Design study of three segment leg with stable region at low and high speed running

Abstract

In previous researches [2, 3], the self-stability was studied for the spring-mass model and the two segment leg model. In these researches, it was presented that the spring-mass model has the self-stable region at relatively high speed running and the two segment leg model has the self-stable region at relatively low speed running. If the model was run in the self-stable region, the cost of transport [1] is zero ideally. That is, actually, only the energy loss is needed to compensate for running. This means that the energy efficiency is high, running in the self-stable region. We want to have high energy efficiency at low and high speed running. So, in this paper, we propose the design direction of the three segment leg having the self-stable region at low and high speed running. And we verify the self-stable region of the three segment leg designed by the proposed design direction. © 2011 IEEE.