What is Integrated Elastic Element

In this chapter, the problem of controlling bipedal walking robots with integrated elastic elements is considered. A survey of the existing control methods developed for walking robots is given, and their applicability to the task of controlling the robots with elastic elements is analyzed. The focus of the chapter lies with the feedback controller design. The chapter studies the influence that the elastic elements modelled as a spring-damper system have on the behavior of the control system. The influence of the spring-damper parameters and the inertial parameters of the actuator gear box and the motor shaft on the generated control laws and the resulting peak torques are discussed. The changes in these effects associated with motor torque saturation and sensors nonlinearities are studied. It is shown that the introduction of torque saturation changes the way the elastic drive parameters affect the resulting behavior of the control system. The ways to use obtained results in practice are discussed.