Abstract
A passive walker is a robot which can walk down a shallow slope without active control or energy input, being powered only by gravity. This paper proposes a control law that can stabilize the gait of a quasi-passive walker by manipulating torque at the hip joint. The motion of the quasi-passive walker is divided into two modes: one is a sinusoidal mode and the other a hyperbolic sinusoidal mode. The controller is designed with a servo system which forces the motion of the sinusoidal mode to track the reference input signal obtained from the phase-plane trajectory of the hyperbolic sinusoidal mode. The generated gait is quite natural, because the input of the servo system is made based on the system dynamics. The results of simulations have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed control law.
