Ankle Joints Are Beneficial When Optimizing Supported Real-world Bipedal Robot Gaits
This addresses the challenge of enhancing stability and speed for legged robots, which are still far from matching natural animal performance, though it is incremental as it builds on existing evolutionary optimization techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of improving bipedal robot performance by investigating the addition of an ankle joint, showing that it results in greater walking speeds in both simulation and physical experiments.
Legged robots promise higher versatility and the ability to traverse much more difficult terrains than their wheeled counterparts. Even though the use of legged robots have increased drastically in the last few years, they are still not close to the performance seen from legged animals in nature. Robotic legs are typically fairly simple mechanically, and few feature an ankle joint, even though most land mammals have one. The ankle could be a key to better performance and stability for legged robots, and in this paper we investigate how the use of an ankle in a bipedal robot could improve its performance when combined with evolutionary techniques for gait optimization. Our study shows, both in simulation and physical experiments, that the addition of an ankle joint results in greater walking speeds for a supported bipedal robot.