PhD defense presentation Daan Hobbelen
On Friday the possibility exists to attend the public PhD defense of Daan Hobbelen together with a visit to the lab of Martijn Wisse. At the end is a nice party to celebrate everything!
Summary of the research of Daan Hobbelen
The general goal of this PhD research is in line with the overall goal of the Dynamic Walking conference: increasing the understanding of the principles and concepts of legged (in this case bipedal) locomotion. This extensive goal was approached with Passive Dynamic Walking (PDW) as the point of departure. First the main principles of PDW were identified, that: 1) are important for the improvement of bipedal walking performance and 2) are not exclusive to fully passive walkers (i.e., are transferable to actuated walkers). These principles form the basis of the paradigm that various Dynamic Walking conference participants have already applied for some time and that was named 'Limit Cycle Walking' in this thesis. Subsequently, various degrees of actuation were studied in an incremental fashion, using both simple simulation models and two actual bipedal robots: the 2D walker 'Meta' and the 3D walker 'Flame' (see pictures). The studied degrees of actuation are: sagittal swing-leg actuation, sagittal ankle actuation, sagittal upper body actuation and lateral swing-leg actuation. Various parameter studies were performed to find out how these degrees of actuation influence performance. The three aspects of performance that were taken into consideration are energy consumption, versatility and the ability to handle unexpected disturbances (i.e., disturbance rejection). For energy consumption and versatility practical quantitative measures already existed, for disturbance rejection a new measure was introduced in this thesis: the Gait Sensitivity Norm. Overall the PhD research resulted in various walking gaits (with models as well as physical robots) that combine low energy consumption with high disturbance rejection. Simultaneously, these results showed some interesting relations with human walking and increased our knowledge on the underlying principles of bipedal locomotion.
