Related topics: physical activity

HRP-4C female robot has a new walk (w/ video)

(PhysOrg.com) -- Japan's entertaining robot that sings and looks like a beautiful young female is finally learning how to walk just like a beautiful girl—well, almost. Robotics developers at the National Institute of ...

Iran unveils human-like robot: report

Iran has developed a new human-like walking robot to be used in "sensitive jobs," government newspaper Iran reported on Sunday.

Math professor and students take 'random walk' together

Some people like to take random walks through the woods, while others might stroll through their own neighborhood. In the world of math, a random walk is in fact more random than this; it would be the equivalent of flipping ...

The cost of being on your toes

Humans, other great apes and bears are among the few animals that step first on the heel when walking, and then roll onto the ball of the foot and toes. Now, a University of Utah study shows the advantage: Compared with heel-first ...

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Walking

Walking (also called ambulation) is the main form of animal locomotion on land, distinguished from running and crawling. When carried out in shallow waters, it is usually described as wading and when performed over a steeply rising object or an obstacle it becomes scrambling or climbing. The word walk is descended from the Old English wealcan "to roll".

Walking is generally distinguished from running in that only one foot at a time leaves contact with the ground; for humans and other bipeds, running begins when both feet are off the ground with each step. (This distinction has the status of a formal requirement in competitive walking events, resulting in disqualification at the Olympic level.) For horses and other quadrupedal species, the running gaits may be numerous, and while walking keep three feet at a time on the ground.

The average human child achieves independent walking ability around 11 months old.

While not strictly bipedal, several primarily bipedal human gaits (where the long bones of the arms support at most a small fraction of the body's weight) are generally regarded as variants of walking. These include:

For humans, walking is the main form of transportation without a vehicle or riding animal. An average walking speed is about 5 to 6 km/h (3 to 4 mph), although this depends heavily on factors such as height, weight, age, terrain, surface, load, culture, and fitness. A pedestrian is a person who is walking on a road, sidewalk or path.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA