Active walking robot mimicking flat-footed passive dynamic walking

Abstract

Many biped robots that achieve high-efficient walking have been proposed in the recent years. Many researchers have thus developed biped robots that achieve active walking based on passive dynamic walking (PDW). Although these biped robots achieve energy-efficient active walking, their walking speed is generally slow. We have proposed a flat-footed PDW robot with the ankle springs and inerters. Using the ankle inerters, this robot achieves more high-speed PDW than PDW of conventional flat-footed robots. We thus developed a flat-footed biped robot achieving active walking on level ground by mimicking the flat-footed PDW. By simulations and experiments, we show that our biped robot achieves more highspeed and energy-efficient active walking than conventional biped robots.