Robot unravels mystery of walking

Roboticists are using the lessons of a 1930s human physiologist to build the world's fastest walking robot.
Runbot is a self-learning, dynamic robot, which has been built around the theories of Nikolai Bernstein.
"Getting a robot to walk like a human requires a dynamic machine," said Professor Florentin Woergoetter.
Runbot is a small, biped robot which can move at speeds of more than three leg lengths per second, slightly slower than the fastest walking human.
Bernstein said that animal movement was not under the total control of the brain but rather, "local circuits" did most of the command and control work.
The brain was involved in the process of walking, he said, only when the understood parameters were altered, such as moving from one type of terrain to another, or dealing with uneven surfaces.
The basic walking steps of Runbot, which has been built by scientists co-operating across Europe, are controlled by reflex information received by peripheral sensors on the joints and feet of the robot, as well as an accelerometer which monitors the pitch of the machine.
These sensors pass data on to local neural loops - the equivalent of local circuits - which analyse the information and make adjustments to the gait of the robot in real time.
How does Runbot walk?
Information from sensors is constantly created by the interaction of the robot with the terrain so that Runbot can adjust its step if there is a change in the environment.
As the robot takes each step, control circuits ensure that the joints are not overstretched and that the next step begins.
But if the robot encounters an obstacle, or a dramatic change in the terrain, such as a slope, then the higher level functions of the robot - the learning circuitries - are used. He said Runbot learned from its mistakes, much in the same way as a human baby.
"Babies use a lot of their brains to train local circuits but once they are trained they are fairly autonomous.
The challenge was now to make Runbot bigger, more adaptive and to better anticipate situations like change of terrain.