Dynamics simulation for a biped robot: modeling and experimental verification

Dynamics simulation is a valuable tool for biped robot hardware and controller design. Due to the complexity of biped walking robots, simulation times can be quite high. It is therefore important to identify the key components in modeling the system so that the phenomena of interest can be correctly predicted at a reasonable numerical cost. In this paper a detailed and a reduced simulation of the biped robot JOHNNIE are presented and results are compared with experimental data. The comparison shows that results for both models correctly predict global dynamics of the system, while some phenomena are only captured by the more complex model