Walking Control Method of Biped Locomotors on Inclined Plane

Abstract

This paper describes a walking control method on inclined planes for a biped locomotor. The walking control consists of a position control, virtual compliance control and posture control. Parameters of the compliance control are changed continuously in support and swing phases. The orientation of robot's waist is kept level by posture control. Several walking experiments on inclined planes are conducted using WL-16R (Waseda Leg -No.16 Refined). WL-16R has achieved stable walking on unknown inclined planes using the walking control method, and the effectiveness of the walking control is confirmed.

Landing Pattern Modification Method with Predictive Attitude and Compliance Control to Deal with Uneven Terrain

“…So, it is possible to employ this new landing pattern modification method with only ground force information. In the meanwhile, the effectiveness of previous control methods [9][10][11][12][13][14] has been confirmed not outdoors but indoors. When biped robots with rigid, flat soles walk in outdoor environment, it is difficult to maintain large support polygon due to the irregularity of grounds.…”

“…Recently, we have built biped locomotors, WL-15 (Waseda Leg -No. 15), WL-16, WL-16R and WL-16RII [5][6][7][8]12] to supply only movement functions. These locomotors will be applicable to the welfare fields as a walking wheelchair or a walking support machine that is able to walk up and down stairs.…”

“…Specially, they will be able to be employed for practical use, if users mount an upper body developed according to their needs on the locomotors. However, it is necessary to improve the loading performance such as maximum loading capacity, energy consumption and robustness against environmental There are many previous works on real-time stability control methods on uneven terrain [9][10][11][12][13][14]. Most of them are required to measure the ZMP (Zero Moment Point), the posture and the acceleration of the upper body of a biped robot and so on.…”

“…If a biped humanoid robot steps on uneven portions of the ground, the position, the orientation and the acceleration of its upper body are rapidly changed. Therefore, by sensing these rapid changes, a highly accurate acceleration control is operated based on the mechanics model of the robot [9][10][11][12]. These control methods will be effective to cope with uneven terrain if the robot is modeled accurately.…”

Application of Parallel Mechanism in Varistructured Quadruped/Biped Human- carrying Walking Chair Robot

“…This parallel-link way of animal is similar to the parallel mechanism (PM), so many scholars tried to use PM as the leg mechanism for walking chair robot. The first biped human-carrying walking robot WL-15 [5] with parallel leg mechanism (PLM) was developed by Waseda University in 2001, and the robots WL-16 [6] , WL-16R [7] , WL-16RII [8] , WL-16RIII [9] and WL-16RIV [10] were proposed later. The mechanism theory for a biped walking robot with PLM was studied by Hebei University of Technology in China [11] .…”