Investigation on a bipedal robot: Why do humans need both Soleus andGastrocnemius muscles for ankle push-off during walking?
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Legged locomotion in humans is influenced by mechanics and neural control. One mechanism assumed to contribute to the high efficiency of human walking is the impulsive ankle push-off, which potentially powers the human swing leg catapult. However, the mechanics of the human's lower leg with its complex muscle-tendon units spanning over single and multiple joints is not yet understood. Legged robots allow testing the interaction between complex leg mechanics, control, and environment in real-world walking gait. We custom developed a small, 2.2 kg human-like bipedal robot with soleus and gastrocnemius muscles represented by linear springs, acting as mono- and biarticular elasticities around the robot's ankle and knee joints. We tested the influence of three soleus and gastrocnemius spring configurations on the ankle power curves, on the synchronization of the ankle and knee joint movements, on the total cost of transport, and on walking speed. We controlled the robot with a feed-forward central pattern generator, leading to walking speeds between 0.35 m/s and 0.57 m/s at 1.0 Hz locomotion frequency, at 0.35 m leg length. We found differences between all three configurations; the soleus spring supports the robot's speed and energy efficiency by ankle power amplification, while the GAS spring facilitates the synchronization between knee and ankle joints during push-off.
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