A Case Study on Influence of Utilizing Hill-Type Muscles on Mechanical Efficiency of Biped Running Gait

The presence of compliant elements in biped running mechanisms generates a smoother motion and decreases the impact forces. Biological creatures that have a complicated actuation system with parallel and series elastic elements in their muscles demonstrate very efficient and robust bipedal gaits. The main difficulty of implementing these systems is duplicating their complicated dynamics and control. This paper studies the effects of an actuation system, including Hill-type muscles on the running efficiency of a kneed biped robot model with point feet. In this research, we implement arbitrary trajectories compatible with the initial condition of the robot, and we calculate the necessary muscle forces using an analytical inverse dynamics model. To verify the results, we execute the direct dynamics of the robot with the calculated control inputs to generate the robot’s trajectory. Finally, we calculate the contractile element force of the muscles and its cost of transport, and we investigate the effects of the muscles’ elements on reducing or increasing the cost of transport of the gait and maximum actuating forces.

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