System overview of bipedal robots Flame and TUlip: Tailor-made for Limit Cycle Walking

Abstract

The concept of dasiaLimit Cycle Walkingpsila in bipedal robots removes the constraint of dynamic balance at every instance during gait. We hypothesize that this is crucial for the development of increasingly versatile and energy-effective humanoid robots. It allows the application of a wide range of gaits and it allows a robot to utilize its natural dynamics in order to reduce energy use. This paper presents the design and experimental results of our latest walking robot dasiaFlamepsila and the design of our next robot in line dasiaTUlippsila. The focus is on the mechanical implementation of series elastic actuation, which is ideal for Limit Cycle Walkers since it offers high controllability without having the actuator dominating the system dynamics. Walking experiments show the potential of our robots, showing good walking performance, though using simple control.