Period-three route to chaos induced by a cyclic-fold bifurcation in passive dynamic walking of a compass-gait biped robot

This paper presents a study of the passive dynamic walking of a compass-gait biped robot as it goes down an inclined plane. This biped robot is a two-degrees-of-freedom mechanical system modeled by an impulsive hybrid nonlinear dynamics with unilateral constraints. It is well-known to possess periodic as well as chaotic gaits and to possess only one stable gait for a given set of parameters. The main contribution of this paper is the finding of a window in the parameters space of the compass-gait model where there is multistability. Using constraints of a grazing bifurcation on the basis of a shooting method and the Davidchack-Lai scheme, we show that, depending on initial conditions, new passive walking patterns can be observed besides those already known. Through bifurcation diagrams and Floquet multipliers, we show that a pair of stable and unstable period-three gait patterns is generated through a cyclic-fold bifurcation. We show also that the stable period-three orbit generates a route to chaos. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.