Title: Torso swaying and walking of a biped robot

Authors: Amur S. Al Yahmadi; Feng Shuai; Sun Zengqi

Addresses: Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, College of Engineering, Sultan Qaboos University, P.O. Box 33, Al Khod, 123, Sultanate of Oman. ' Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China. ' Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

Abstract: The upper part of the body makes up nearly two thirds of the body weight yet usually it is looked at as only being passively carried by the legs. Although the role of the upper limbs in walking is indeed secondary to that of the lower limbs, their movements are not purely passive. In the first half of the paper, we introduce a novel method to control a biped with a torso to walk stably. In this control method, there is only one low gain PD controller between the torso and the stance leg, with the swing leg remaining totally free. Simulation results show that, by adopting this controller, the biped robot can walk over a range of step period and a wide range of step length. In the second part of the paper, we use an optimisation-based approach to predict the walking motion of a simple biped with a torso.

Keywords: gait transition; biped robots; walking robots; robot gait; torso control; robot control; mobile robots; simulation; legged locomotion; torso swaying.

DOI: 10.1504/IJVNV.2012.046176

International Journal of Vehicle Noise and Vibration, 2012 Vol.8 No.1, pp.95 - 113

Published online: 29 Aug 2014 *

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