Exciting Engineered Passive Dynamics in a Bipedal Robot

This is an author's peer-reviewed final manuscript, as accepted by the publisher. The published article is copyrighted by IEEE-Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and can be found at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=8860©2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.The publisher's version of this article includes two additional authors, Andrew Peekema and Mikhail Jones, whose names do not appear on the manuscript version as posted here. The title and abstract also vary slightly.Dynamic bipedal robots, which are capable of versatile\ud behaviour, are rare. Most bipedal robots are either versatile\ud and static or dynamic and limited to specific gaits. Over the\ud last twenty years the bio-inspired spring mass model became a\ud versatile template for bipedal walking and running gaits with\ud many studies motivated by its high potential for versatile robot\ud locomotion. However the characteristic dynamics have not yet\ud been demonstrated with human size robots.\ud \ud \ud \ud We show that we can reproduce the dynamics of this versatile\ud template for locomotion in a human-size biped utilizing its\ud specifically designed natural dynamics. Spring mass walking\ud with characteristic double humped force profiles is demonstrated\ud over a range of speeds. Using the same controller, the\ud robot exhibits grounded running, walks over steps, and in an\ud natural outdoor environment.\ud \ud \ud \ud The robot is an important step towards bipedal machines\ud capable to compete with animals in terms of efficiency, robustness\ud and versatility and enables a better understanding of\ud fundamental biological movement principles