Abstract
The restoration of mechanical energy lost during the collision between a leg and the ground is requisite for a steady and continuous gait. One principle to do this is the parametric excitation. Recently, Asano et a!. applied this principle to a biped robot with telescopic legs, and succeeded in generating a sustainable biped gait in a computer simulation. In this paper, we deal with a model of a biped robot that has semicircular feet and actuated knees. Though this robot has no actuator at the hip, knee actuators can sustain gait by parametric excitation. We first verify that an actuated knee can cause parametric excitation and then show by computer simulation that the proposed biped robot can walk continuously with actuated knees only.
