Parametric excitation based gait generation for ornithoid walking

The parametric excitation based gait generation method proposed by Asano et al. restores mechanical energy lost by heel-strike collisions. Harata et. al. applied this method to a kneed biped robot which is proper for the parametric excitation, and show that sustainable gait has been generated with only knee torque. A swing-leg of a kneed biped robot has similar mechanism to an acrobot, and many acrobots bends a joint in inverse direction like ornithoid walking. This suggests that inverse bending a knee restores more mechanical energy than forward bending like human walking, and hence, inverse bending may be more efficient. In this paper, we propose a parametric excitation based ornithoid gait generation method for a kneed biped robot, and show that it can walk sustainably by numerical simulation. We also show that parametric excitation based inverse bending walking is more efficient than parametric excitation based forward bending walking with respect to performance indices in our model.