The Effects of Walking Speed and Hardness of Terrain on the Foot-Terrain Interaction and Driving Torque for Planar Human Walking

The foot-terrain interaction mechanics of human is important in understanding the biped locomotion mechanism. This paper aims to investigate the effect of walking speed and the hardness of the terrain on foot-terrain interaction mechanics. In the experiments, mobile portable plantar mechanical measuring insoles with 107 sensor elements were used to gauge the plantar force and contact area in real-time. Seven subjects with healthy feet have participated in typical experiments. The statistical methods including correlation analysis, univariance analysis, and systematic identification are primarily used to obtain several main results. Bimodal functions in describing the total pressure-time relations were performed at slow and regular speeds but only one hump is left if walking at fast paces; they can be unified and summed by three subsections’ unimodal functions. The forefoot produces a large peak impact force in slow and regular quasi-static walking on both hard ground and deformable terrains, while the heel absorbs more dynamic impact shocks in fast walking on hard ground. The torques generated by the ankle joints are calculated based on plantar force or its derived information such as zero moment point. Some implications are drawn, for example, the dynamically changed positions of zero moment point (ZMP) for humans are similar to that generated by reptiles wiggling through the flowable terrains; increasing the stride length on the hard ground produces more impact vibrations than quickening paces but more effective in accelerating walks on deformable terrains.