The bipedal saddle space: modelling and validation

Better understanding of human balance control is pivotal for applications such as bipedal robots and medical technologies/therapies targeting human locomotion. Despite the inverted pendulum model being popular for describing bipedal locomotion, it does not properly capture the step-to-step transition dynamics. The major drawback has been the requirement for both feet to be on the ground which generates a discontinuity along the intersection of the potential energy surfaces produced by the two legs. To overcome this problem, we propose a generalized inverted pendulum-based model that can describe both single and double support phases. The full characterization of the system's potential energy allows the proposed model to drop the main limitation. This framework also enables optimal strategies to be designed for the transition between the two feet without the optimization algorithms. The proposed theory has been validated by comparing the human locomotor strategies output of our planner with real data from multiple experimental studies. The results show that our model generates trajectories consistent with human variability and performs better than existing well-known methods.