Gait control of combined rimless wheel using active wobbling mass that vibrates backward and forward

Abstract

The authors have clarified that an active wobbling mass that vibrates up-and-down in the body frame of a passive combined rimless wheel (CRW) significantly increases the generated walking speed by the effect of entrainment to the wobbling motion. This paper then investigates the effects of an active wobbling mass that moves backward and forward in the body frame on the generated gait properties. First, we develop the reduced mathematical model for analysis and design the controller for driving the wobbling mass. Second, we show that the walking speed is successfully increased by adjusting the desired wobble frequency according to the effect of entrainment through numerical simulations. Furthermore, we conduct verification experiments using our CRW machine.