Quasi-human biped walking

Abstract

Our goal is to develop biped humanoid robots capable of working stably in a human living and working space, with a focus on their physical construction and motion control. At the first stage, we have developed a human-like biped robot, WABIAN (WAseda BIped humANoid), which has a thirty-five mechanical degrees of freedom. Its height is 1.66 [m] and its weight 107.4 [kg]. In this paper, a moment compensation method is described for stability, which is based on the motion of its head, legs and arms. Also, a follow walking method is proposed which is based on a pattern switching technique. By a combination of both methods, the biped robot is able to perform dynamic stamping, walking forward and backward in a continuous time while someone is pushing or pulling its hand in such a way. Using WABIAN, human-fellow walking experiments are conducted, and the effectiveness of the methods are verified.