A Topological Approach to Gait Generation for Biped Robots
This addresses gait generation for biped robots, offering a systematic approach that could improve efficiency in robotics, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing optimization frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of generating walking gaits for biped robots by introducing a topological method that constructs manifolds of feasible periodic gaits using equilibria as templates, eliminating the need for random initial guesses, and demonstrates it on 2D and 3D walkers.
This paper describes a topological approach to generating families of open- and closed-loop walking gaits for underactuated 2D and 3D biped walkers subject to configuration inequality constraints, physical holonomic constraints (e.g.,closed-loop linkages), and virtual holonomic constraints (user-defined constraints enforced through feedback control). Our method constructs implicitly-defined manifolds of feasible periodic gaits within a state-time-control space that parameterizes the biped's hybrid trajectories. Since equilibrium configurations of the biped often belong to such manifolds, we use equilibria as "templates" from which to grow the gait families. Equilibria are reliable seeds for the construction of gait families, eliminating the need for random, intuited, or bio-inspired initial guesses at feasible trajectories in an optimization framework. We demonstrate the approach on several 2D and 3D biped walkers.