Running and walking with compliant legs

What are the common design and control principles of legged locomotion? To approach this question we ask about the internal leg function, e.g. the number of leg segments, the arrangements of muscles, ligaments and other soft tissue within the leg and the appropriate muscle activation patterns in order to generate a desired leg behavior. On the other hand we need to integrate the leg into an overlying control system the global leg function such that we can observe a ’complete’ movement pattern including legs and the supported body. This means that if we have simple, biologically meaningful models describing the leg behavior in a desired movement task we could use these leg templates (i.e. simplified models, [1]) to derive the required leg control strategy. A very