Self-excitation control for biped walking mechanism

Abstract

This paper presents the self-excited walking of a four-link biped walking mechanism which possesses an actuated hip joint, passive knee joints and a curved feet. Instead of gravity potential energy, the natural walking motion of the four-link biped mechanism is self-excited by the hip joint torque which is proportional to the angle of the swing shank. In this paper, we show that this self-excitation control enables the 3-DOF planar biped model to walk on level ground by numerical simulation. From the parameter study of the feedback gain, we found that stable walking motion was possible over the wide range of this parameters, and walking velocity and periods were not so much affected. It was confirmed that the properties of this self-exciting walking, such as walking velocity and duration, were changed by the structural parameters of the walking model.