One-Legged Locomotion with a Compliant Passive Joint

Abstract. There is an increasing attention of exploiting compliant materials for the purpose of legged locomotion, because they provide significant advantages in lo-comotion performance with respect to energy efficiency and stability. Toward es-tablishing a fundamental basis for this line of research, a minimalistic locomotion model of a single legged system is explored in this paper. By analyzing the dy-namic behavior of the system in simulation and a physical robotic platform, it is shown that a stable locomotion process can be achieved without the necessity of sensory feedback. In addition, further analysis characterizes the relation between motor control and the natural body dynamics determined by morphological prop-erties such as body mass and spring constant