Development of a Passive Dynamic Walking Robot Based on Mechanical Structural Parameters Optimization

Passive dynamic walking robot can walk with low energy consumption and exhibits human-like natural gait. However, because the walking performance greatly or fully depends on the mechanical structural parameters, their walking stability is quite low compared to active walking robot. In other words, proper mechanical parameters are one of the key factors to achieve stable walking for a passive dynamic walking robot. In this paper, parametric mechanical structural parameters were used to fulfill the parameters optimization process and optimal mechanical structural parameters were obtained based on the global stability analysis with cell-mapping method by numerical simulation. A passive dynamic biped walking robot prototype with hip joint, knee joints, ankle joints and an upper body was developed based on the optimization result, both the simulation and experiments results proved that the optimization result is reasonable.