A head-neck-system to walk without thinking Mehdi Benallegue, Jean-Paul Laumond, Alain Berthoz To cite this version: Mehdi Benallegue, Jean-Paul Laumond, Alain Berthoz. A head-neck-system to walk without thinking. 2015. hal-01136826 HAL Id: hal-01136826 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01136826 Preprint submitted on 28 Mar 2015 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. 1 A head-neck-system to walk without thinking Mehdi Benallegue1, Jean-Paul Laumond1, Alain Berthoz2;∗ 1 LAAS, CNRS, Toulouse, France 2 LPPA, CNRS/Coll`egede France, Paris, France ∗ E-mail:
[email protected] Abstract Most of the time, humans do not watch their steps when walking, especially on even grounds. They walk without thinking. How robust is this strategy? How rough can the terrain be to walk this way? Walking performance depends on the dynamical contribution of each part of the body. While it is well known that the head is stabilized during the motions of humans and animals, its contribution to walking equilibrium remains unexplored. To address the question we operate, in simulation, a simplified walking model. We show that the introduction of a stabilized head-neck system drastically improves the robustness to ground perturbations.