Analysis of limit cycle in passive walking

Abstract

Passive walking robot can dynamically walk down with natural gait by the interaction between walker's dynamics and environment (slope). This robot can exhibit a stable limit cycle and its gait bifurcates for larger slope. Analysis of dynamics of passive walking may be useful for understanding human locomotion and development of walking machine. In this paper, we focus on the mechanism of limit cycle. And, we demonstrate that the leg exchange plays the important role in a stable limit cycle. We also investigate the behavior of stability of fixed point for short and long period gaits from analysis of eigenvalues.