ABSTRACT
Locomotion, the ability of a body to move from one place to another, is a defining characteristic of animal life. In the natural setting, locomotion takes on many forms, whether it’s the swimming of amoebas, flying of birds, or walking of humans. To the extent that a machine equipped with two legs may imitate a human’s gait, bipedal robots are biomimetic. Experiments conducted on a bipedal test bed named RABBIT yielded stable walking over a wide range of speeds and with significant robustness to model error and external perturbations. A canonical problem in bipedal robots is how to design a controller that generates closed-loop motions, such as walking or running, that are periodic and stable. The terminology will allow an informal description of the essential elements of a dynamic model of a bipedal robot to be given which, in turn, will allow some challenging aspects of the control problem to be raised.
