Optimization and Comparison of Human and Avian Robotic Walking

摘要

Robotic bipedal locomotion is not developed yet to the level of performance of human walking, and design alternatives are being pursued so that current state-of-art robots can achieve the necessary viability for commercial application. Even though different locomotion morphologies than bipedal walking are being studied and realized into prototypes, the evolutive competitiveness of human morphology points to an inherent advantage in bipedal walking. There is, however, an alternative to human bipedal walking: avian bipedal walking. To understand the competitiveness of each, this study compares humanlike robotic bipedal walking with avianlike, according to different performance criteria. To limit the comparison to the physical structure, optimal control is used to extract the most efficient control for each optimization criterion. This study extends our previous study [1] of comparison of energy consumption of single leg models into a comparison of different performance metrics for whole-body planar models with 6 degrees of freedom.