Human-like Walking of a Biped Robot Actuated by Pneumatic Artificial Muscles and Springs

Human walking gait is much more natural looking and energy efficient compared with biped robots. This paper presents a bio-inspired approach to realizing more human-like biped robotic walking. For this purpose, a biped robot actuated coordinately by pneumatic artificial muscles and springs is developed, capable of exploiting passive compliance of the mechanical system in locomotion. And a control scheme for human-like walking is designed based on finite state machine. Experiments show that the biped robot can walk stably on the treadmill even with some small obstacles. The realized gait has the important features of human walking, including heel strike and toe off, stretched knees, and variation in the height of the body's center of mass, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach.