Tomorrow at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Singapore, Mounir Boudali will present our work (done jointly with Justin Tang and myself) on computing invariant funnels for walking robots.
The main idea is to compute “funnels”, i.e. regions of stability for the complex dynamics of a bipedal walking robot. This particular paper extends past work by dramatically simplifying some computations of transverse dynamics for certain planar biped models, and also gives results of hardware experiments on a compass-gait walker verifying the funnels are “real”. An example is shown below.