4 accepted papers
Legged robots offer several advantages when navigating unstructured environments, but they often fall short of the efficiency achieved by wheeled robots. One promising strategy to improve their energy economy is to leverage their natural (unactuated) dynamics using elastic elements. This work explor
For a class of biped robots with impulsive dynamics and a non-empty set of passive gaits (unactuated, periodic motions of the biped model), we present a method for computing continuous families of locally optimal gaits with respect to a class of commonly used energetic cost functions (e.g., the inte…
In this work, we present a nonlinear dynamics perspective on generating and connecting gaits for energetically conservative models of legged systems. In particular, we show that the set of conservative gaits constitutes a connected space of locally defined 1D submanifolds in the gait space. These ma
We present a homotopic approach to generating energetically optimal gaits for legged robots that maps passive (i.e., unactuated) gaits of an energetically conservative model of the robot to a model with user-defined target dynamics with dissipation and actuation (i.e., the more “realistic” legged mo…