Legged robot

Summary

Legged robots are a type of mobile robot which use articulated limbs, such as leg mechanisms, to provide locomotion. They are more versatile than wheeled robots and can traverse many different terrains, though these advantages require increased complexity and power consumption. Legged robots often imitate legged animals, such as humans or insects, in an example of biomimicry. Gait and support pattern Legged robots, or walking machines, are designed for locomotion on rough terrain and require control of leg actuators to maintain balance, sensors to determine foot placement and planning algorithms to determine the direction and speed of movement. The periodic contact of the legs of the robot with the ground is called the gait of the walker. In order to maintain locomotion the center of gravity of the walker must be supported either statically or dynamically. Static support is provided by ensuring the center of gravity is within the support pattern formed by legs in conta

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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.

IEEE2014

Adapting to the ground enables stable footholds in legged locomotion by exploiting the structure of the terrain. On that account, we present a passive adaptive planar foot with three rotational degrees of freedom that is lightweight and thus suited for highly dynamic legged robots. Its low laying pivot joint provides high stability towards kinking. Information about the relative foot sole pose, and accordingly, the ground orientation is gathered by inertial measurement units (IMUs) placed on the foot sole and the shank. A complementary filter is presented that fuses these orientation estimates with an angular encoder to obtain a drift-free relative foot sole pose. The passive adaptive planar foot has been tested and compared to the classical point foot design on a variety of terrains and shows superior traction performance, especially on compressible soils. Being mounted on the quadrupedal robot ANYmal, the foot provides a reliable contact detection based on the fusion of the built-in 6-axis force/torque transducer and the IMUs. This allows to walk and trot on uneven terrain, loose soils, as well as climbing up a ramp and stairs while keeping the entire foot sole in ground contact all the time.

2019

Proximity Human-Robot Interaction Using Pointing Gestures and a Wrist-mounted IMU

We present a system for interaction between co-located humans and mobile robots, which uses pointing gestures sensed by a wrist-mounted IMU. The operator begins by pointing, for a short time, at a moving robot. The system thus simultaneously determines: that the operator wants to interact; the robot they want to interact with; and the relative pose among the two. Then, the system can reconstruct pointed locations in the robot's own reference frame, and provide real-time feedback about them so that the user can adapt to misalignments. We discuss the challenges to be solved to implement such a system and propose practical solutions, including variants for fast flying robots and slow ground robots. We report different experiments with real robots and untrained users, validating the individual components and the system as a whole.

2019