Center of percussion and gait design of biped robots

In this paper a novel gait generation technique is proposed, whose objective is to optimize the mechanical design of actuated bipeds in order to reduce energy consumption. The novelty is the use of the center of percussion of the robot to calculate the equivalent simple pendulum of the system. With the equivalent pendulum, the gait is parameterized using its natural frequency. The advantage of this technique is the possibility to assess the influence of the mass and inertia properties of a biped robot on the gait. Therefore, an intelligent design of the kinematic chain can be made using the equivalence developed here. In addition, the method is a new option to linearize biped systems. Control is achieved by designing an adaptive PD controller for gait generation. This algorithm is applied to a compass-like biped with knees and a flywheel as a replacement for the body.