Controlling a Five-link Planar Bipedal Walking Mechanism

[RoboGuy]

Researcher Atilim Gunes Baydin has published a paper describing the evolution of central patterngenerators for the control of a five-link planar bipedal walkingmechanism (PDF format). A physical walking platform was built thathad four joints - a knee and hip joint on each leg. Initial attemptswere made to hand-tune a stable walking gait to see if it was possible.This proved very difficult with the walker destabilizing after a shorttime. Next, controllers were evolved using genetic algorithms in asimulated environment and then tested on the real hardware to see howthey performed in the real world. This produced a number of stable,human-like gaits including some which were able to maintain a stablegait even when not making use of sensory feedback.

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