Employing a novel gait pattern generator on a social humanoid robot

Abstract

This paper presents a novel Gait Pattern Generator ((IPC) developed for the "Alice" social humanoid robot, which up to now lacked an appropriate walking pattern. Due to t he limitations of this robot, the proposed gate pattern generator was formulated based on a nine-mass model to decrease the modeling errors and t he inverse kinematics of the whole lower-body was solved in such a way that the robot remained statically stable during t he movements. The main challenge of this work was to solve t he inverse kinematics of a 7-link chain with 12 degrees of freedom. For this purpose, a new graphical-numerical technique has been provided using the definition of the kinematic equations of the robot joint s' Cartesian coordinates. This method resulted in a significant increase in t he solution rate of calculations. Finally, a novel algorithm was developed for step-by-step displacement of the robot towards a desired destination in a two-dimensional space. Performance of the proposed gate pattern generator was evaluated both with a model of the robot in a MAT LAB Simulink environment and in real experiments with the Alice humanoid robot.