First steps toward underactuated human-inspired bipedal robotic walking

This paper presents the first steps toward going from human data to formal controller design to experimental realization in the context of underactuated bipedal robots. Specifically, by studying experimental human walking data, we find that specific outputs of the human, i.e., functions of the kinematics, appear to be canonical to walking and are all characterized by a single function of time, termed a human walking function. Using the human outputs and walking function, we design a human-inspired controller that drives the output of the robot to the output of the human as represented by the walking function. The main result of the paper is an optimization problem that determines the parameters of this controller so as to guarantee stable underactuated walking that is as “close” as possible to human walking. This result is demonstrated through the simulation of a physical underactuated 2D bipedal robot, AMBER. Experimentally implementing this control on AMBER through “feed-forward” control, i.e., trajectory tracking, repeatedly results in 5-10 steps.