Exciting Engineered Passive Dynamics in a Bipedal Robot

2015

Article

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A common approach in designing legged robots is to build fully actuated machines and control the machine dynamics entirely in soft- ware, carefully avoiding impacts and expending a lot of energy. However, these machines are outperformed by their human and animal counterparts. Animals achieve their impressive agility, efficiency, and robustness through a close integration of passive dynamics, implemented through mechanical components, and neural control. Robots can benefit from this same integrated approach, but a strong theoretical framework is required to design the passive dynamics of a machine and exploit them for control. For this framework, we use a bipedal spring–mass model, which has been shown to approximate the dynamics of human locomotion. This paper reports the first implementation of spring–mass walking on a bipedal robot. We present the use of template dynamics as a control objective exploiting the engineered passive spring–mass dynamics of the ATRIAS robot. The results highlight the benefits of combining passive dynamics with dynamics-based control and open up a library of spring–mass model-based control strategies for dynamic gait control of robots.

@article{escidoc:2310483,
  title = {Exciting Engineered Passive Dynamics in a Bipedal Robot},
  author = {Renjewski, Daniel and Spr{\"o}witz, Alexander and Peekema, Andrew and Jones, Mikhail and Hurst, Jonathan},
  journal = {{IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation}},
  volume = {31},
  number = {5},
  pages = {1244--1251},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  address = {New York, NY},
  year = {2015},
  doi = {10.1109/TRO.2015.2473456},
  url = {http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7270326/}
}