A simple 3D straight-legged passive walker with flat feet and ankle springs

To date, most passive walkers have been designed with arc-shaped feet rigidly attached to the legs. We developed a simple 3D straight-legged passive walker with flat feet and ankle springs. The flat feet are connected to the legs with springs at the ankles that produce torsional force while the stance leg is on the ground, mimicking the motion of simple 3D passive walkers with arc-shaped feet. This helps to prevent slipping and to handle the disturbance behavior of the robot. Flat feet are particularly advantageous for yaw stability. Our 3D passive-walker robot with a 0.84-m leg can walk the full length of a 1.8-m slope at about 0.44 m/s.

[1]  Tad McGeer,et al.  Passive Dynamic Walking , 1990, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[2]  M. Coleman,et al.  The simplest walking model: stability, complexity, and scaling. , 1998, Journal of biomechanical engineering.

[3]  M. Coleman,et al.  An Uncontrolled Walking Toy That Cannot Stand Still , 1998 .

[4]  A. Ruina,et al.  Efficiency, speed, and scaling of two-dimensional passive-dynamic walking , 2000 .

[5]  Martijn Wisse,et al.  A Three-Dimensional Passive-Dynamic Walking Robot with Two Legs and Knees , 2001, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[6]  Dan B. Marghitu,et al.  Rigid Body Collisions of Planar Kinematic Chains With Multiple Contact Points , 1994, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[7]  Russ Tedrake,et al.  Efficient Bipedal Robots Based on Passive-Dynamic Walkers , 2005, Science.

[8]  Arend L. Schwab,et al.  Skateboards, Bicycles, and Three-dimensional Biped Walking Machines: Velocity-dependent Stability by Means of Lean-to-yaw Coupling , 2005, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[9]  Franck Plestan,et al.  Asymptotically stable walking for biped robots: analysis via systems with impulse effects , 2001, IEEE Trans. Autom. Control..

[10]  Arend L. Schwab,et al.  A 3D passive dynamic biped with yaw and roll compensation , 2001, Robotica.

[11]  Arend L. Schwab,et al.  Basin of Attraction of the Simplest Walking Model , 2001 .

[12]  H. Sebastian Seung,et al.  Actuating a simple 3D passive dynamic walker , 2004, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2004. Proceedings. ICRA '04. 2004.

[13]  Garth Zeglin,et al.  Ankle springs instead of arc-shaped feet for passive dynamic walkers , 2006, 2006 6th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots.

[14]  Andy Ruina,et al.  A Bipedal Walking Robot with Efficient and Human-Like Gait , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[15]  Tad McGeer,et al.  Passive Dynamic Biped Catalogue, 1991 , 1991, ISER.

[16]  Benoit Thuilot,et al.  Compass-Like Biped Robot Part I : Stability and Bifurcation of Passive Gaits , 1996 .

[17]  Arthur D. Kuo,et al.  Stabilization of Lateral Motion in Passive Dynamic Walking , 1999, Int. J. Robotics Res..