There exists a class of two-legged machines for which walking is a natural dynamic mode. Once started on a shallow slope, a machine of this class will settle into a steady gait quite comparable to human walking, without active control or energy input. Interpretation and analysis of the physics are straightforward; the walking cycle, its stability, and its sensitivity to parameter variations are...

The purpose of this study is to extend the three-dimensional (3-D) passive dynamic biped walker to a 3-D dynamic biped walker, i.e., a walker that can walk on a horizontal surface based on a passive dynamic walking. A new prototype of 3-D biped walker called RW04, which has telescopic knee joints, was developed and its ability for walking was validated through some experiments. A sinusoidal osc...

Recently, a lot of researches which aim at realization of dynamic biped walking are being performed. There is Honda's ASIMO as a representative of researches of humanoid robots. ASIMO has joints of many degrees of freedom that are near to a human being, high environment adaptability and robustness, and can do various performances. However, it needs many sensors, complicated control, and walks w...

Passive dynamic walking, a phenomenon originally described for bipeds having straight legs, also works with knees. Thus given only a downhill elope aa a source of energy, a humanlike pair of legs will settle into a natural gait generated by passive interaction of gravity and inertia. No muscular input is required. The physice is much the same as in straightlegged walking, but the knee-jointed f...

Human biped locomotion is an ultimate style of biological movement that is a highly evolved function. Biped locomotion by robots is a dream to be attained by the most highly evolved or integrated technology, and research on this has a history of over 30 years. Many methods of generating gaits have been proposed. There has been a tendency to reduce the complicated dynamics of a walking robot to ...

2 State of the Art Previous studies indicated that introducing adaptable compliance to dynamic walking is beneficial to modulating walking performance and extending the versatility [1-3]. However, in most of these studies, the stiffness is changed off-line. The transition of different walking patterns in real time was not investigated. Our previous study [4] has demonstrated walking pattern tra...

Researches are under way based on the concept of passive dynamic walking to improve the efficiency and to realize more natural gait of controlled biped robot. In this research, we investigated the energy based method to find the initial condition for stable one-period gait cycle. The energy balance method, we proposed here, is easier way than the conventional approaches in finding the proper in...