Passive dynamic autonomous control of bipedal walking

This paper proposes the novel control method named Passive Dynamic Autonomous Control. PDAC is based on the following concept which Grizzle et al¹⁰ used previously: 1) point-contact 2) interlocking. Point-contact means that the contact state between a robot and the ground is made point. This make it possible to control based on the robot inherent dynamics although the control becomes difficult. Interlocking means that all robot joints are connected and interlocked. We present the new approach using this concept to describe the robot dynamics as a 1-DOF autonomous system. Due to autonomy, this approach has two folIowing notabIe point: 1) period from foot-contact to next foot-contact can be obtained 2) there is a conservative quantity. In this paper, the coupling method of the sagittal and lateral motion that takes advantage of point 1 is proposed. In addition, the stabilizing method based on the conservative quantity is de signed. By means of PDAC and these methods, stable 3-dimensional walking based on the robot inherent dynamics is realized.