Arms Swing Effects on a Walking Planar Biped

A walking gait is designed for a planar biped with two identical three-link legs, a trunk and two one-link arms. This nine-link biped is controlled via eight torques to obtain one step of a cyclic gait. The scope of this paper is to investigate the effects of arms swing on the energy consumption during walking of a fully actuated planar biped robot. Kinematics and dynamics of a biped, HYDROID, are used for this study. Desired gaits are considered to be cyclic having single support phases separated by flat foot impacts. Different evolutions of the arms: arms held, arms bound and arms swing are compared. For each case, we use a parametric optimization method with constraints to produce reference cyclic trajectories according to an energy criterion. The numerical results show that this criterion is lower in the case where the arms swing.