Regenerative braking is a well-known technology applied in electric vehicles to achieve high energy efficiency through an energy-recovery mechanism. The same concept has been robotic applications, such as legged robots, lower-limb prostheses, and biomechanical harvesters. In particular, harvester enables humans generate watts of power while simultaneously assisting the human joints during walki...

Supervised learning is used to build a control policy for robust, dynamic walking of an underactuated bipedal robot. The training and testing sets consist of controllers based on a full dynamic model, virtual constraints, and parameter optimization to meet torque limits, friction cone, and environmental conditions. The controllers are designed to induce periodic walking gaits at various speeds,...

Augmented Downhill Simplex Method (ADSM) is introduced here, that is a heuristic combination of Downhill Simplex Method (DSM) with Random Search algorithm. In fact, DSM is an interpretable nonlinear local optimization method. However, it is a local exploitation algorithm; so, it can be trapped in a local minimum. In contrast, random search is a global exploration, but less efficient. Here, rand...

Ventilatory equivalents for oxygen and carbon dioxide are physiological measures of breathing efficiency, and are known to be affected by the intensity and mode of exercise. We examined the effect of level running (gradient 0%) and muscle-damaging downhill running (−12%), matched for oxygen uptake, on the ventilatory equivalents for oxygen (V̇E/V̇Ο2) and carbon dioxide (V̇E/V̇CO2). Nine men (27 ± 9...

Using open-flow respirometry and video footage (25 frames s(-1)), the energy expenditure and hindlimb kinematics of barnacle geese, Branta leucopsis, were measured whilst they were exercising on a treadmill at gradients of +7 and -7 deg, and on a level surface. In agreement with previous studies, ascending a gradient incurred metabolic costs higher than those experienced on level ground at comp...

In order to investigate hexapod walking, experimental studies on animals have been performed in parallel with software and hardware simulations of the control structures and the body to be controlled. In this paper, we will describe the basic behavioral properties of hexapod walking, as they are known from stick insects, and a simple neural network called Walknet, which exemplifies these proper...