Interconnection and Damping Assignment Passivity-Based Control for Gait Generation in Underactuated Compass-Like Robots

A compass-like biped robot can go down a gentle slope without the need of actuation through a proper choice of its dynamic parameter and starting from a suitable initial condition. Addition of control actions is requested to generate additional gaits and robustify the existing one. This paper designs an interconnection and damping assignment passivity- based control, rooted within the port-Hamiltonian framework, to generate further gaits with respect to state-of-the-art methodologies, enlarge the basin of attraction of existing gaits, and further robustify the system against controller discretization and parametric uncertainties. The performance of the proposed algorithm is validated through numerical simulations and comparison with existing passivity-based techniques.