Design and Construction of MIKE; a 2-D Autonomous Biped Based on Passive Dynamic Walking

For research into bipedal walking machines, autonomous operation is an important issue. The key engineering problem is to keep the weight of the actuation system small enough. For our 2D prototype MIKE, we solve this problem by applying pneumatic McKibben actuators on a passive dynamic biped design. In this paper we present the design and construction of MIKE and elaborate on the most crucial subsystem, the pneumatic system. The result is a fully autonomous biped that can walk on a level floor with the same energy efficiency as a human being. We encourage the reader to view the movies of the walking results at http://dbl.tudelft.nl/.