Bipedal Walking Over Discrete Steps

This applet is a simulation of a bipedal walking robot walking over discrete steps. This simulation is a companion to the paper "Velocity Based Stability Margins for Fast Bipedal Walking" presented at the First Ruperto Carola Symposium in the International Science Forum of the University of Heidelberg entitled "Fast Motions in Biomechanics and Robots", September 7-9, 2005, Heidelberg Germany. The simulation is a Java Applet implemented with the Yobotics Simulation Construction Set software package. The graphical image can be rotated and zoomed by dragging with the 3 mouse buttons. To run the simulation, you must have a Java enabled browser with Java3D installed. If you are on a Windows machine and do not see a simulation, follow the instructions on the bottom of this page. For other operating systems, similar pages exist for installing the Java plugin and the Java3D plugin.

If you were using a Java-capable browser with Java3D installed, you would see a simulation of a bipedal walking robot instead of this paragraph.

 

If you do not see a simulation:

  1. Install the Java Plugin: Go to www.java.com/en/download/windows_automatic.jsp This will automatically install the latest Java plugin on your browser. You may need to reboot after this step.
  2. Install Java3D: Go to the Java3D Binary Downloads page at https://java3d.dev.java.net/binary-builds.html and click on the most recent Java 3D release builds installation executable. Run the installation program. It should search for all of your installed Java Runtime Environments and install Java3D in each of them.
  3. Increase the amount of memory that applets can use: Open your Java Control Panel from the Control Panel. To do so, go to Start->Control Panel and click on "Switch to Classic View". Then double click the Java listing. From the Java Control Panel, click the Java tab, and then click "View" under "Java Applet Runtime Setting". There will be one or more JREs listed. For each of them, inside the Java Runtime Parameters box, add -Xms256m -Xmx256m
  4. Restart your browser and reload this page.
  5. If the screen flickers or the graphics look wrong, loading the newest version of your video driver often fixes the problem since old drivers occassionally have bugs that make Java3D not work properly.
  6. If you still cannot get the simulation to run, email me with as much details as possible and I'll try to help.