Passive Dynamic Walker Simulation

In Dynamics  at Olin College in fall 2013, I and my teammate built a physics-based simulation of a passive dynamic walker. Passive dynamic walkers are unactuated bipeds that use gravity to walk down a shallow slope. The structures that currently exist throughout the world are often used to imitate the dynamic motion of the human gait. In this project, we modeled a simple point-mass, bipedal walker in MATLAB using equations of motion outlined by Garcia et al in their paper "The Simplest Walking Model: Stability, Complexity, and Scaling". Our simulation results indicate that stable gait-cycles exist for ramp angles of approximately 0.009 rad to 0.013 rad. Outside of this range, the passive dynamic walker either fails immediately or is unable to maintain forward motion for more than a few steps. Within the stable range, our simulated walker is capable of walking for more than 16000 steps without failing.

This project taught me about the importance of making a modulated product. It also introduced methods of validation for which I could feel confident in a model that I constructed. 

Please see the project report here.