Effects of knee locking and passive joint stiffness on energy consumption of a seven-link planar biped

Energetic efficiency and stability are the fundamental criteria which can improve the autonomy and task performance capabilities of humanoid robots. The scope of this paper is to investigate the energetic effects of knee locking and addition of torsional springs to different joints of a seven-link fully actuated planar bipedal robot. The focus is on the reduction of energy consumption during walking. The energetic cost of walking is determined without joint stiffness and knee locking as a baseline for the comparison of results. In the first approach, the gait trajectory is optimized by adding springs to different joints and energetic cost of walk is then calculated at different walking speeds. The second approach presented in this paper is to mechanically lock the support knee and then optimize the gait and calculate the walking cost. The energetic cost of walking determined for the above two cases is then compared to the baseline cost. It is observed that addition of torsional springs at both hips reduce the walking cost up to 50%, support hip up to 85% with spring stiffness as an optimization variable for both cases while mechanically locking the support knee reduces the cost of walking up to 25% with gait and knee locking angle optimized.