The Effect of Foot Structure on Locomotion of a Small Biped Robot

Abstract

This paper is a presentation of a work that consists of considering a novel foot structure for biped robot inspired by human foot. The specific objective is to develop a foot mechanism with human-like toes for a small biped robot. The chosen architecture to present the biped includes ten degrees of freedom (DoF) on ten articulations between eleven links. Our study considers the effect of varying foot structure on a walking process of the robot in simulation by ADAMS (MSC software, USA) through gait generation method. In toe mechanism, aiming to reduce the energy consumption, the passive joint was selected as the toe joint. The center of gravity (CoG) point trajectories of the robot with varying toe is compared with each other in normal motion on flat terrain to determine the most consistent toe mechanism. The result shows that the selected foot structure enables the robot to walk stably and naturally.