Spring-Mass Walking With ATRIAS in 3D: Robust Gait Control Spanning Zero to 4.3 KPH on a Heavily Underactuated Bipedal Robot

We present a reduced-order approach for dynamic and efficient bipedal control, culminating in 3D balancing and walking with ATRIAS, a heavily underactuated bipedal robot. These results are a development toward solving a number of enduring challenges in bipedal locomotion: achieving robust 3D gaits at various speeds and transitioning between them, all while minimally draining on-board energy supplies. Our reduced-order control methodology works by extracting and exploiting general dynamical behaviors from the spring-mass model of bipedal walking. When implemented on a robot with spring-mass passive dynamics, e.g. ATRIAS, this controller is sufficiently robust to balance while subjected to pushes, kicks, and successive dodge-ball strikes. The controller further allowed smooth transitions between stepping in place and walking at a variety of speeds (up to 1.2 m/s). The resulting gait dynamics also match qualitatively to the reduced-order model, and additionally, measurements of human walking. We argue that the presented locomotion performance is compelling evidence of the effectiveness of the presented approach; both the control concepts and the practice of building robots with passive dynamics to accommodate them.