Effects of Ankle Elasticity on Dynamic Biped Walking

To develop biped robots achieving energy-efficient dynamic walking, flat-footed biped robots with mechanical impedance at each ankle are recently proposed. Many previous studies have empirically shown that biped robots achieve energy-efficient walking using the ankle elasticity. We have not, however, known that clear effects of ankle elasticity achieving energy-efficient walking of flat-footed biped robots yet. In this paper, we discuss the effects of ankle elasticity that achieve energy-efficient walking of flat-footed biped robots with mechanical impedance at the ankles using the equivalence between walking of flat-footed biped robots with ankle impedance and walking of arc-footed biped robots. These results show that the ankle elasticity of biped robots generates energy for overcoming potential barrier.