Abstract
Humans have soft deformable feet that contribute not only to stabilizing motion but also to extracting sensory information for the generation of adaptive walking. In this paper, we developed a bipedal robot with soft deformable feet and proposed an unconventional CPG model that exploits local sensory feedback of superficial sensation from the deformable feet. The experimental results show that the bipedal robot exhibits adaptive walking by spontaneous switching between oscillatory and excitatory regimes according to superficial sensation. The fact strongly supports that the superficial sensation generated from soft deformable feet plays an essential role to generate adaptive bipedal walking.
