Abstract
This paper discusses the effect of deformability of soft feet with plantar aponeurosis on stable bipedal walking. Plantar aponeurosis is an important organ to support a longitudinal arch of feet and contributes to acquiring sensory information on superficial sense of feet. To this end, we modeled a musculoskeletal system of bipedal robot and performed locomotion experiments on numerical simulation. Through our simulations, we analyzed the effect of feet deformation on robustness against continuous perturbation and found that the plantar aponeurosis enhances the robustness. This result supports that the deformation of soft feet plays a pivotal role to emerge the sensor-motor coordination, which is the key to generate adaptive behavior in robotic system.
