LEGO Biped Project

[dlavery]

If you are really serious about building a bipedal walking machine, let me make two suggestions:

- read everything you can about dynamic stability and dynamic locomotion. Bipedal walking is not a statically stable process. When you are walking, you are constantly "almost falling" and using the moving foot to arrest the fall. A lot of people wasted a lot of time trying to make walking machines that were completely stable at any moment in time. It was only after they realized that walking is an inherently unstable process, and the that stability is due to the constant motion of the center of mass, that real progress was made. To avoid a lot of blind alleys, think about how you will keep the center of mass of your entire machine moving constantly - don't think that it has to be balanced at any given moment.

- find and read everything you can by Marc Raibert. Marc founded the MIT Leg Lab, before he went off to Boston Dynamics, and is one of the world's leading experts in bipedal legged locomotion. Everyone else is just now catching up on the work he did 20 years ago.

Good luck! (and keep us posted on the progress!)

-dave