Lateral stability of the spring-mass hopper suggests a two-step control strategy for running

This paper investigates the control of running gaits in the context of a spring loaded inverted pendulum model in three dimensions. Specifically, it determines the minimal number of steps required for an animal to recover from a perturbation to a specified gait. The model has four control inputs per step: two touchdown angles (azimuth and elevation) and two spring constants (compression and decompression). By representing the locomotor movement as a discrete-time return map and using the implicit function theorem we show that the number of recovery steps needed following a perturbation depends upon the goals of the control mechanism. When the goal is to follow a straight line, two steps are necessary and sufficient for small lateral perturbations. Multistep control laws have a larger number of control inputs than outputs, so solutions of the control problem are not unique. Additional constraints, referred to here as synergies, are imposed to determine unique control inputs for perturbations. For some choices of synergies, two-step control can be expressed as two iterations of its first step policy and designed so that recovery occurs in just one step for all perturbations for which one-step recovery is possible. (C) 2009 American Institute of Physics. [DOI: 10.1063/1.3127577]