A Robot That Walks the Walk
From: Michigan Today - Fall 2005 - page 8
By: Conny Coon

Two-legged robots are the best models for understanding the dynamics of
walking, but most of today's existing bipedal robots walk on the basis of a
quasi-static stability notion, which imposes a conservative walking motion in
which the foot remains flat on the ground to achieve balance with each step.
Human locomotion on the other hand is statically unstable in most points of
the gait: if you were to attempt to "freeze" your motion in mid-stride, you'd
fall. A human gait uses dynamic stability. The flat-footed walking of current
robots is clearly un-human-like. 

With support from the National Science Foundation and the U-M Center for
Biomedical Engineering Research, Grizzle began working cooperatively with a
French research team to solve the problem of dynamic stabilization in walking
robots. Their project, ROBBEA, produced RABBIT, a bipedal robot specifically
designed to advance the fundamental understanding of controlled, legged
locomotion.  

Read the entire article at:
http://www.umich.edu/news/MT/05/Fall05/story.html?robotwalks2

Links:
Jessy W. Grizzle
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~grizzle/index.html

