Abstract
Walking is a mechanical process involving all the limbs the body and subject to balance constraints. The structure of the body can allow the emergence of a stable walking using few to no energy, but this motion is sensitive to external perturbations and prone to fall easily. On the other hand, with strong actuation and anticipation, much more disturbances can be overcome, but at the cost of high energy consumption. The choice between these two modes of locomotion is more than a context-dependent binary selection. It is a continuous tradeoff, not only providing a span of different walking control policies but building the framework of a precise classification of these controllers. In this chapter, we discuss, for the humans and the robots, the two extreme walking paradigms and how to sort the solutions ranging between them. We analyze also the incentives behind the decision to change to a more robust or more efficient control policy. Finally, we show that the versatility of a walker depends deeply on the relationships lying between its controller dynamics and its mechanical design, both being ideally built together in a process of codesign.
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- 1.
From this sentence until the end of the chapter, body heading angle is excluded from the objectives of locomotion. Nevertheless, adding orientations does not change drastically the core of the discussion.
- 2.
Of course other constraints also have to be enforced, such as avoiding to slide and all kinds of joint limitations, but they are easier to guarantee in this case.
- 3.
This is mainly due to the limitations of the walker, in terms of torques, velocities and joint positions.
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This work was partially funded by the European Research Council grant Actanthrope (ERC-ADG 340050).
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Benallegue, M., Laumond, JP. (2019). Bipedal Locomotion: A Continuous Tradeoff Between Robustness and Energy-Efficiency. In: Venture, G., Laumond, JP., Watier, B. (eds) Biomechanics of Anthropomorphic Systems. Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, vol 124. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93870-7_12
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