Advances in Curved-Foot Dynamic Walking

Many researchers have successfully designed and built dynamic bipedal walkers with curved feet. The design process for these walkers, however, is typically based on intuition and/or poorly documented, suggesting the opportunity for improvements to be made through more systematic design. The most energy efficient bipeds have curved feet, as studies have shown that replacing point feet with curved feet can produce significant energy savings, both in simulation and in experiment [1, 2]. Additionally, during normal human walking, the center of pressure traces a nearly circular arc from heel contact until opposite heel contact when plotted in a shank-fixed frame [3]. It follows that understanding the design of curved feet has potential implications for lower limb protheses.