Frontal Plane Bipedal Zero Dynamics Control
This work addresses a specific bottleneck in robotics for bipedal locomotion, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing decoupled control methods.
The paper tackled the understudied problem of stabilizing frontal dynamics in 3D bipedal walking by extending the hybrid zero dynamics framework to frontal gait design, resulting in a formal approach for generating stable walking gaits.
In bipedal gait design literature, one of the common ways of generating stable 3D walking gait is by designing the frontal and sagittal controllers as decoupled dynamics. The study of the decoupled frontal dynamics is, however, still understudied if compared with the sagittal dynamics. In this paper it is presented a formal approach to the problem of frontal dynamics stabilization by extending the hybrid zero dynamics framework to deal with the frontal gait design problem.