Initiating Normal Walking of a Dynamic Biped with a Biologically Motivated Control

Two-legged locomotion is a much reseached topic in the robotics community since many decades. Nevertheless human walking and running is still unequaled. This paper introduces a biologically motivated approach of controlling bipeds that is based on recent results from neurological research on human walking. It features a hierarchical network of skills, motor patterns and reflexes that works locally and distributed and tries to exploit the natural dynamics of the system. The control concept is illustrated by the process of walking initiation.