A novel sideway stability control method for bipedal walking robot

Abstract

This paper presents a novel sensing and balancing method for bipedal walking robot. The proposed method involves the design of semi-rigid ankle joint to facilitate the responsive and accurate measurement of the sideway (sagittal) instability of the walking robot. The use of double balancing mass and the developed control algorithms provide a constant sideway stability of the robot while it walks in forward direction. The smooth legs trajectory planning then can be implemented successfully regardless of the robot sideway stability condition. The developed method is able to decouple the walking algorithms from the robot stability issues. Furthermore, the use of two different masses for the balancing helps to improve response time and efficiency of the balancing system. In this paper, the proposed method is tested on the simplified model of a robot balancing on its single leg and the feasibility of the method is confirmed by the simulation results obtained with MATLAB Simulink tools. © 2011 American Institute of Physics.