Parametric optimization of motion and stiffness characteristics of passive drives of a bipedal walking robot

Journal article, 2002

The problem of optimization both structural parameters of passive drives and motion of a bipedal anthropomorphic robot is studied. The motion of the robot is modeled by taking into account the kinematic characteristics of human gait. At the feet of the robot there are passive drives that are modeled by springs having piece-wise stiffness parameters. The optimization problem has been converted into a nonlinear programming problem by approximation of the generalized coordinates using smoothing cubic splines and solved numerically. Analysis of the solution has shown that the kinematic characteristics of the motion of the robot with passive drives located at the hinges of the feet are relatively close to the same characteristics of a human gait.