Abstract
This study discusses a CPG-based control of bipedal locomotion that enables stable and smooth transition between stationary state and walking as well as the resilience against perturbation. To this end, we have rethought the design principle of CPG-based control, through which we have concluded that exploiting merely (periodic) "oscillatory regime is not sufficient for satisfying our requirements. Thus, we have employed an "active rotator model", which exhibits the "excitatory regime" as well as the oscillatory regime. To verify the validity of our control scheme, we modeled a musculoskeletal model for biped robot with deformable feet and performed locomotion experiments in numerical simulations. The results strongly support that the proposed CPG model allows the robot to exhibit significantly stable transition between standing and walking motion by exploiting spontaneous switching between the oscillatory and excitatory regimes according to the spatiotemporal patterns of sensory information from the deformable feet.
