Synthesis of Controllers for Stylized Planar Bipedal Walking

We present a method for computing controllers for stable planar-biped walking gaits that follow a particular style. The desired style is specified with a kinematic target trajectory that may or may not be physically realizable. A nearest-neighbor controller representation is used and its free parameters are optimized using a local parameter search technique. The optimization function is constructed by integrating a mass-distance metric over fixed time intervals, which serves to measure the deviation of a simulated motion from a desired target motion. We demonstrate simulated bipedal walks having user-specified styles, walks for bipeds of varying dimensions, walks over terrain of known slopes, and walks that are robust with respect to unobserved terrain variations and modeling errors.