Industry Monitor Humanoid Industrial & Cobot AGV / AMR Quadruped Reducers · Servos · Sensors Drones & Autonomy Embodied AI
Robos News
Robotics

Comparative Study on Agility, Efficiency, and Impact Absorption of Bipedal Robots with Active Toes

arXiv:2606.19699v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human legs exhibit high efficiency, agility, and impact absorption, with toes playing a crucial role in these capabilities. While many attempts have been made to implement human-like toes in robots, they have not fully replicated human characteristics nor rigorously validated their benefits. We propose a 14-DOF biped robot emulating human toes' lightweight, high-torque, robust nature. To quantitatively analyze the effectiveness of the active toes

Published June 19, 2026 · Category: Robotics

Overview

arXiv:2606.19699v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human legs exhibit high efficiency, agility, and impact absorption, with toes playing a crucial role in these capabilities. While many attempts have been made to implement human-like toes in robots, they have not fully replicated human characteristics nor rigorously validated their benefits. We propose a 14-DOF biped robot emulating human toes' lightweight, high-torque, robust nature. To quantitatively analyze the effectiveness of the active toes in terms of agility, efficiency, and impact absorption, we developed a high-fidelity simulation training environment that reflects actual actuators with coupled transmissions and accurate power consumption. To ensure a fair comparison between configurations with and without active toes, we designed a minimal RL reward function and applied an identical training procedure to both. The simulation results indicate that, at 1.33 m/s walking, the toe-equipped robot reduced CoT by 17.5% and heel-strike GRF by 5.0% compared with the toe-ablation configuration. On the agility test, average and maximum path deviation decreased by 25.0% and 34.0%, respectively.

Source

Originally published at arxiv.org.

Related Articles

Robos News Newsroom

Robos News reports on robotics research, components, manufacturers, field deployments, and industrial automation worldwide. Tip our newsroom: [email protected]

Email the newsroom →
Reporting standard: Product specifications, deployment counts, and performance claims are attributed to their source. Safety-critical decisions should be based on the applicable technical documentation and validation for the operating environment.
More from Research →