An Approach for Generating Families of Energetically Optimal Gaits from Passive Dynamic Walking Gaits

For a class of biped robots with impulsive dynamics and a non-empty set of passive gaits (unactuated, periodic motions of the biped model), we present a method for computing continuous families of locally optimal gaits with respect to a class of commonly used energetic cost functions (e.g., the integral of torque-squared). We compute these families using only the passive gaits of the biped, which are globally optimal gaits with respect to these cost functions. Our approach fills in an important gap in the literature when computing a library of locally optimal gaits, which often do not make use of these globally optimal solutions as seed values. We demonstrate our approach on a well-studied two-link biped model.
Comment: Published in the IROS 2023 proceedings. This version has several updated sections and figures. The proceedings contains a supplementary video, see https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10342322/media#media . An implementation of the results are also available, see https://github.com/nr-codes/OptimalGaitsForCompassGait