Energy and angular momentum control of robot running

Kurzfassung

A new approach for running by exploiting passive elastic dynamics is addressed in this paper. A control method based on energy and angular momentum regulation is proposed. The controller exploits invariance properties of energy and angular momentum to achieve stabilization of passive gaits with almost zero control effort after convergence. The passive gaits are derived based on a modified version of the well-known SLIP model, which takes into account the pitch dynamics during the flight phase, which is otherwise disregarded by the conventional SLIP model. Based on this model, the interesting phenomenon of running in presence of persistent somersaulting is investigated and persistently-somersaulting running gaits are identified and analyzed. Numerical simulations investigate the method and confirm the effectiveness in ideal conditions.