Muscle mechanical work is an important biomechanical quantity in human movement analyses and has been estimated using different quantities including external, internal and joint work. The goal of this study was to investigate the relationships between these traditionally used estimates of mechanical work in human walking and to assess whether they can be used as accurate estimates of musculoten...

Conventional models of bipedal walking generally assume rigid body structures, while elastic material properties seem to play an essential role in nature. On the basis of a novel theoretical model of bipedal walking, this paper investigate a simple model for biped robots which makes use of minimum control and elastic passive joints inspired from the structures of biological systems. The model i...

Humans tend to swing their arms when they walk, a curious behaviour since the arms play no obvious role in bipedal gait. It might be costly to use muscles to swing the arms, and it is unclear whether potential benefits elsewhere in the body would justify such costs. To examine these costs and benefits, we developed a passive dynamic walking model with free-swinging arms. Even with no torques dr...

Compared to human locomotion capabilities, today’s bipedal robots are still lacking in efficiency, velocity, and robustness. Thus, a control concept for dynamic walking based on insights into human motion control is suggested. Key features include the exploitation of passive dynamics, no usage of a full dynamic model, and hierarchical, distributed control. Walking robustness in presence of unkn...

1 Motivation Walking with traditional passive lower-limb prostheses requires additional muscular effort and increased metabolic consumption (1.3-2.5 times the energy expended by a healthy person [1]). This supplementary effort cannot be sustained by many geriatric and dysvascular amputees (the majority of the amputee population [2]) for more than few steps, resulting in a partial or total reduc...

S3 MIT learning biped. This movie begins with the powered robot imitating passive walking down a 0.9 degree slope, from three camera angles. Then it shows the robot learning to walk on flat terrain with foam protective pads. The controller kicks the robot into random initial conditions between learning trials. After a few minutes, the robot is walking well in place, so we command it to walk in ...