Modeling of a bipedal locomotor using coupled nonlinear oscillators of Van der Pol

 Research to date points to an understanding of human biped locomotion that has been primarily experimental in nature largely due to the complexity of the process. In view of the new, exciting possibilities of programmed electrostimulation of artificial muscles to generate motion (locomotion), a critical study at the theoretical level is greatly warranted. There is strong evidence that many biological clocks consist of a population of mutually coupled oscillators [Pavlidis T (1973) Biological oscillators, Academic; Johnsson A (1978) Zur Biophysik biologischer Oszillatoren. In: Biophisik, Springer]. In this work, a form of bipedal locomotion is simulated by using mutually coupled nonlinear oscillators. A planar model, which includes three out of the six determinants of gait that characterize the human locomotion, was adopted. Received: 4 August 2002 / Accepted: 12 November 2002 / Published online: 7 March 2003 Correspondence to: M. S. Dutra (e-mail: max@serv.com.ufrj.br) Acknowledgements. The authors would like to express their gratitude to CNPq, CAPES, and FAPERJ for the financial support provided during the course of this research.