Human foot placement and balance in the sagittal plane.

Foot placement has long been recognized as the primary mechanism that humans use to restore balance. Many biomechanists have examined where humans place their feet during gait, perturbations, and athletic events. Roboticists have also used foot placement as a means of control but with limited success. Recently, Wight et al. (2008, "Introduction of the Foot Placement Estimator: A Dynamic Measure of Balance for Bipedal Robotics," ASME J. Comput. Nonlinear Dyn., 3, p. 011009) introduced a planar foot placement estimator (FPE) algorithm that will restore balance to a simplified biped that is falling. This study tested the FPE as a candidate function for sagittal plane human-foot-placement (HFP) by recording the kinematics of 14 healthy subjects while they performed ten walking trials at three speeds. The FPE was highly correlated with HFP (rho>or=0.997) and its accuracy varied linearly from 2.6 cm to -8.3 cm as walking speed increased. A sensitivity analysis revealed that assumption violations of the FPE cannot account for the velocity-dependent changes in FPE-HFP error suggesting that this behavior is volitional.

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