Artificial Intelligence Lab Department of Informatics University of Zurich Andreasstrasse 15 8050 Zurich Switzerland

ShanghAI Lectures
Fall Term 2011

Exercise 2: Passive Dynamic Walkers

Distribution: 20 October 2011 Due date: 3 November 2011 31 October 2011 For questions, please contact Daniel Germann, germann@ifi.uzh.ch Total amount of points: 25 Introduction Passive Dynamic Walkers are mechanical devices that can walk down a slope without any actuation. They are usually inspired by the human legs and, despite a complete lack of motors and sensors, display a very natural-looking walking motion. For an introduction to Passive Dynamic Walkers (PDW), please read the Science paper Efficient Bipedal Robots Based on Passive-Dynamic Walkers by Steve Collins et al [1]. It also describes minimally actuated versions of such robots that are able to walk on level ground. You will also find an introduction to PDW in the course's book How the Body Shapes the Way we Think on page 109.

Simulation In this exercise, you will work with a simulation of a PDW in Webots [2]. It is modelled after the Cornell version depicted in Fig. 1C in the above paper, which is copied from McGeer's original passive dynamic walker. In order not to fall sideways, it actually has four legs instead of two, but the motion pattern corresponds to a biped gait. Please download the simulation from [3]. We thank Sasha Voloshina for creating the simulation and Yvan Bourquin and Olivier Michel from Cyberbotics for their Webots support. In Webots, the PDW is modelled using a tree structure that reflects the hierarchy of how the parts are attached to each other. You find this hierarchy in the window on the left called scene tree. Fig. 1 illustrates the tree to give you an overview of how the model is composed.

Fig. 1: Overview of the scene tree that defines the PDW in Webots. The node outer_upper Group contains the three shapes that make up the top bar and the thighs of the outer leg pair (highlighted in red). Note that all servo nodes are entirely passive in this simulation, i.e. they are not actuated an only serve as revolution joints. Note that there is only one hinge for each degree of freedom, e.g. the inner legs are both connected to the same joint (inner_upper Servo, marked by the red ellipse). This means that the inner two legs are always parallel to each other. The same is true for the outer legs. inner_lower Servo is a subnode (child) of inner_upper Servo because the inner lower legs are connected to the inner upper legs. This also means that transformations defined inside this subnode are always relative to the transformation of the parent node.

PDW are agents that live in a very narrow niche (ramps of a certain angle range). This means that they are susceptible to changes in the environment that make them fail, i.e. stumble and fall over. The same is true for parameters defining a PDW's own morphology. In the simulation, you may find it interesting to play with the following parameters: Slope angle: SLOPE Solid rotation angle. Initial vertical position / falling height of the walker: walker Supervisor translation Y. Initial (joint) angles: walker Supervisor rotation, walker Supervisor

inner_upper Servo rotation, walker Supervisor inner_upper Servo inner_lower Servo rotation and walker Supervisor outer_lower Servo.

ShanghAI Lectures Fall Term 2011 Exercise 2

Mass distribution: the mass parameters can be found in the physics nodes of walker Supervisor (mass for the outer upper group), inner_upper Servo, inner_lower Servo, inner_foot Servo, outer_lower Servo and outer_foot Servo.

Contact material (friction): WorldInfo ContactProperties. See the Webots reference manual, section 3.12 ContactProperties for an explanation of the different parameters. Joint properties: parameters in the Servo nodes like minStop and maxStop.

Tasks 1. (8 points) When loading the simulation, you will realize that the slope is actually horizontal and the walker falls backwards almost off the ramp. Tune the angle of the slope to make the walker walk down the entire ramp. Do also plot the distance the PDW walks before it falls over as a function of the slope angle, i.e. make a diagram with slope angle on the x-axis and distance travelled on the y-axis. Use an interval of [0, 0.2] for the angle and a resolution of at least 0.01. Increase the resolution in the interesting regions. Do not measure the distance walked precisely, only estimate it in terms of steps taken (e.g. (0.12, 0.5) means that the walker took half a step before falling down at a slope angle of 0.12). Briefly describe how you interpret the chart. Take a video of the PDW walking down the entire ramp, similar to the video on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-47V7Nr8UY. Deliverables: Document containing a value for the slope angle that makes the PDW walk down the entire slope, the chart, a brief interpretation of the chart (a few sentences); a video. 2. (5 points) Change the slope angle to 0.15. As you can see, this makes the PDW do one step and then fall over. Try to restore a complete walk down the slope by now tuning a different parameter, the initial vertical position (falling height) of the walker. Is the new value higher or lower? Do you have an explanation why? Deliverables: Document containing the parameter value found for the height and an explanation (a few sentences). 3. (12 points) Write down your thoughts about the following aspects of the PDW and its simulation: a) Although the PDW simulation is physically based and not a formal virtual world such as chess, a researcher may want to build a real PDW in addition to the simulation. Elaborate the differences between virtual worlds and the real world by giving three reasons why a researcher may want to do this. b) What does the term self-stabilization refer to in the PDW example? c) Explain why the PDW displays stable walking under certain conditions even though it doesn't have sensors and actuators. d) Compare the PDW to Honda's Asimo [4] and examples of humanoid bipeds in Webots [5]. Also consider the three constituents principle (p. 100 in HTB). Mention at least three aspects. e) 4. Compare the PDW to human walking. Mention four similarities and/or differrences. Deliverables: Document containing one or two sentences answering each point. [Optional] (2 bonus points) You may realize that not all configurations (sets of parameters) are stable. Find a configuration that blows up the simulation in a fun way and send us the video. :-) Deliverables: Parameter value and video.

ShanghAI Lectures Fall Term 2011 Exercise 2

References [1] Steve Collins, Andy Ruina, Russ Tedrake and Martijn Wisse, Efficient Bipedal Robots Based on PassiveDynamic Walkers, Science, Vol. 307, no. 5712, pp. 1082-1085, 2005. [2] Webots, http://www.cyberbotics.com/ [3] ShanghAI LecturesWebsite http://shanghailectures.org/ [4] Asimo, humanoid robot built by Honda, http://asimo.honda.com/ [5] E.g. Hoap2: WEBOTS_HOME/projects/robots/hoap/worlds/hoap2_walk.wbt; DARwIn-OP: WEBOTS_HOME/projects/robots/darwin-op/worlds/darwin-op.wbt; KHR2-HV: WEBOTS_HOME/projects/robots/khr/khr-2hv/worlds/khr-2hv.wbt; Nao: WEBOTS_HOME/projects/contests/robotstadium/worlds/robotstadium.wbt.

ShanghAI Lectures Fall Term 2011 Exercise 2