Passive Dynamic Walker

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Passive Dynamic Walker

Unactuated Bipedal Walking Motion

The act of walking on two legs is incredibly complex. The level of balance and coordination that is required for such a basic task is mindblowing. As the final project in our Dynamics class, my team mate and I designed and constructed an incredibly simple passive dynamic walker that simulates the bipedal walking motion. Our model abstracts out the knees and only includes the hip as a joint, and does not utilize any actuators. Instead, it relies on an intial velocity and the potential energy from walking down a ramp to stay in motion. In addition to building a walker, we used the equations of motion to create a MATLAB simulation of our walker in motion.