Experimental verification of the characteristic behaviors in passive dynamic walking

Abstract

AbstractIt is well known that passive dynamic walking shows chaotic behavior owing to changes in the environment. In addition, when the environment changes continuously during walking, passive dynamic walking shows “adaptive behaviors” in which the stride angle changes itself in an attempt to keep walking. These behaviors are very interesting and useful for the legged robot design. However, the studies on passive dynamic walking are preceded only by numerical simulations. For this reason, it is very important to confirm, by actual experiments, whether these characteristic behaviors appear. In this paper, we verify the existence of these behaviors by several actual experiments.