Arms Swing Effects on a Walking Planar Biped

A walking gait is designed for a planar biped with two identical three-link legs, a trunk and two one-link arms. This ninelink biped is controlled via eight torques to obtain a cyclic gait. The scope of this paper is to investigate the effects of arms swing on the reduction of energy consumption during walking of a fully actuated planar biped robot. Kinematics and dynamics of a biped, HYDROID, are used for this study. Desired gaits are considered to be cyclic having single support phases separated by flat foot impacts. Different evolutions of arms: arms held, arms bound and arms swing will be compared. For each case, we use a parametric optimization method with constraints to produce reference cyclic trajectories according to an energy criterion. The numerical results show that this criterion is lower in the case where arms swing.