Zero-Moment Point on a bipedal robot under bio-inspired walking control

Abstract

Humanoid robots are currently still far from reaching the impressive human walking capabilities. Among the different methods used to design walking controllers, those based on the Zero-Moment Point (ZMP) criterion are among the most popular, even if they induce intrinsic limitations in terms of energy consumption and robustness. In parallel, bio-inspired controllers are emerging. They overcome the ZMP-based limitations, but still miss robust stabilization rules to be validated on real robots. This contribution studies how to efficiently compute the ZMP in realtime on a robot walking with bio-inspired control rules, in order to detect when the robot stability is compromised.