A simple approach to diverse humanoid locomotion

Abstract

We propose a simple design strategy for diverse humanoid locomotion, which does not require a precise model of the robot and does not need careful design of desired gait trajectories. We show that a humanoid robot can walk using simple sinusoidal desired joint trajectories with their phase adjusted by a coupled oscillator model. We use the center of pressure location and its velocity to detect the phase of the robot dynamics. This phase information is used to modulate the desired joint trajectories. We do not explicitly use dynamical parameters of the humanoid robot. We applied the proposed control strategy to our newly developed human sized humanoid robot CB and a small size humanoid robot, enabling them to generate diverse range of locomotive patterns.