Dynamically and Biologically Inspired Legged Locomotion: A Review

Abstract

[abstFig src='/00290003/01.jpg' width='300' text='Passive dynamic walking: RW03 and Jenkka III' ] Legged locomotion, such as walking, running, turning, and jumping depends strongly on the dynamics and the biological characteristics of the body involved. Gait patterns and energy efficiency, for instance, are known to be greatly affected, not only by travel speed and ground contact conditions but also by body structure such as joint stiffness and coordination, and foot sole shape. To understand legged locomotion principles, we must elucidate how the body’s dynamic and biological characteristics affect locomotion. Efforts should also be made to incorporate these characteristics inventively in order to improve locomotion performance with regard to robustness, adaptability, and efficiency, which realize more refined legged locomotion. For this special issue, we invited our readers to submit papers with approaches to achieving legged locomotion based on dynamic and biological characteristics and studies investigating the effects of these characteristics. In this paper, we review studies on dynamically and biologically inspired legged locomotion.