A pattern generator of humanoid robots walking on a rough terrain using a handrail

Abstract

This paper presents a biped humanoid robot that is able to walk on a rough terrain while touching a handrail. The contact wrench sum (CWS for short) is used as the criterion to judge if the contact between the robot and the environment is strongly stable under the sufficient friction assumption, where the contact points are not coplanar and the normal vectors at the points are not identical. It is confirmed that the proposed pattern generator can make the robot walk as desired in dynamics simulations and experiments, and the motions can be improved by a hand position control and using waist joints.