From passive to active dynamic walking

This paper is concerned with a walking robot with knees on level ground imi tating the passive walking on a given slope. Basic principle of a proposed control method is that dynamics of the active walking robot is matched to t hat of the passive walking one. However, since it is hard for the knee-join ted walking robot to successively or robustly realize a stable passive walk ing on the downhill slope, the passive walking robot is first actively cont rolled to continue to walk with an actuator at the hip. Then the dynamics o f the walking robot on the level grand is matched to that of the stabilized passive walking robot on the slope by implementing actuators at the ankles as well as at the hip. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.