In Nonlinear Dynamics, our research entitled
Delays in perception and action for improving walk-run transition stability in bipedal gait
has been accepted and published! Download from here
Bipedal animals change their locomotion between walking and running in pursue of energy cost, and as a result, they have preferred transition speed as a threshold. That transition is, however, regarded as a nonlinear system with hysteresis between walk-to-run and run-to-walk transitions. We assume that this hysteresis is caused by delays in perception and action, so we implement them explicitly into our gait controller for both walking and running, which has been proposed previously. After Bayesian optimization to the degrees of the delays, we found that the delays absolutely improved the gait stability and energy efficiency. This is because the manifolds to stably achieving walking and running are apart from each other, so it is difficult to jump between them discretely while keeping the stability.