Walking Without Impacts as a Motion/Force Control Problem

The paper deals with the synthesis of control for impactless bipedal walking. In order to avoid impacts, both the specified motion of the biped and its ground reactions are controlled, yielding a combined motion and force control problem. A method for modeling and solving such problems is proposed, and then illustrated by the example of an impactless planar walk of a seven-link bipedal robot. Some numerical results of the motion simulation are reported.