Gait Transition from Quadrupedal to Bipedal Locomotion of an Oscillator-driven Biped Robot

Abstract

Kinematical and dynamical studies on biped robots are important for robot control. As described above, although model-based approaches using inverse kinematics and kinetics have generally been used, the difficulty of establishing adaptability to various environments as well as complicated computations has often been pointed out. In this paper, we employed an internal structure composed of nonlinear oscillators that generated robot kinematics and adequately responded based on environmental situations and achieved dynamically stable quadrupedal and bipedal locomotion and their transition in a biped robot. Specifically, we generated robot kinematical motions using rhythmic signals from internal oscillators. The oscillators appropriately responded to sensory signals from touch sensors and modulated