75 research outputs found
Footstep Adjustment for Biped Push Recovery on Slippery Surfaces
Despite extensive studies on motion stabilization of bipeds, they still
suffer from the lack of disturbance coping capability on slippery surfaces. In
this paper, a novel controller for stabilizing a bipedal motion in its sagittal
plane is developed with regard to the surface friction limitations. By taking
into account the physical limitation of the surface in the stabilization trend,
a more advanced level of reliability is achieved that provides higher
functionalities such as push recovery on low-friction surfaces and prevents the
stabilizer from overreacting. The discrete event-based strategy consists of
modifying the step length and time period at the beginning of each footstep in
order to reestablish stability necessary conditions while taking into account
the surface friction limitation as a constraint to prevent slippage. Adjusting
footsteps to prevent slippage in confronting external disturbances is perceived
as a novel strategy for keeping stability, quite similar to human reaction. The
developed methodology consists of rough closed-form solutions utilizing
elementary math operations for obtaining the control inputs, allowing to reach
a balance between convergence and computational cost, which is quite suitable
for real-time operations even with modest computational hardware. Several
numerical simulations, including push recovery and switching between different
gates on low-friction surfaces, are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness
of the proposed controller. In correlation with human-gait experience, the
results also reveal some physical aspects favoring stability and the fact of
switching between gaits to reduce the risk of falling in confronting different
conditions.Comment: for associated simulation video, see https://youtu.be/BWzUgHGdl3
Development of a Locomotion and Balancing Strategy for Humanoid Robots
The locomotion ability and high mobility are the most distinguished features of humanoid robots. Due to the non-linear dynamics of walking, developing and controlling the locomotion of humanoid robots is a challenging task. In this thesis, we study and develop a walking engine for the humanoid robot, NAO, which is the official robotic platform used in the RoboCup Spl. Aldebaran Robotics, the manufacturing company of NAO provides a walking module that has disadvantages, such as being a black box that does not provide control of the gait as well as the robot walk with a bent knee. The latter disadvantage, makes the gait unnatural, energy inefficient and exert large amounts of torque to the knee joint. Thus creating a walking engine that produces a quality and natural gait is essential for humanoid robots in general and is a factor for succeeding in RoboCup competition.
Humanoids robots are required to walk fast to be practical for various life tasks. However, its complex structure makes it prone to falling during fast locomotion. On the same hand, the robots are expected to work in constantly changing environments alongside humans and robots, which increase the chance of collisions. Several human-inspired recovery strategies have been studied and adopted to humanoid robots in order to face unexpected and avoidable perturbations. These strategies include hip, ankle, and stepping, however, the use of the arms as a recovery strategy did not enjoy as much attention. The arms can be employed in different motions for fall prevention. The arm rotation strategy can be employed to control the angular momentum of the body and help to regain balance. In this master\u27s thesis, I developed a detailed study of different ways in which the arms can be used to enhance the balance recovery of the NAO humanoid robot while stationary and during locomotion. I model the robot as a linear inverted pendulum plus a flywheel to account for the angular momentum change at the CoM. I considered the role of the arms in changing the body\u27s moment of inertia which help to prevent the robot from falling or to decrease the falling impact. I propose a control algorithm that integrates the arm rotation strategy with the on-board sensors of the NAO. Additionally, I present a simple method to control the amount of recovery from rotating the arms. I also discuss the limitation of the strategy and how it can have a negative impact if it was misused. I present simulations to evaluate the approach in keeping the robot stable against various disturbance sources. The results show the success of the approach in keeping the NAO stable against various perturbations. Finally,I adopt the arm rotation to stabilize the ball kick, which is a common reason for falling in the soccer humanoid RoboCup competitions
Biped Locomotion: Stability analysis, gait generation and control
Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH
Planning and Control Strategies for Motion and Interaction of the Humanoid Robot COMAN+
Despite the majority of robotic platforms are still confined in controlled environments such as factories, thanks to the ever-increasing level of autonomy and the progress on human-robot interaction, robots are starting to be employed for different operations, expanding their focus from uniquely industrial to more diversified scenarios.
Humanoid research seeks to obtain the versatility and dexterity of robots capable of mimicking human motion in any environment. With the aim of operating side-to-side with humans, they should be able to carry out complex tasks without posing a threat during operations.
In this regard, locomotion, physical interaction with the environment and safety are three essential skills to develop for a biped.
Concerning the higher behavioural level of a humanoid, this thesis addresses both ad-hoc movements generated for specific physical interaction tasks and cyclic movements for locomotion. While belonging to the same category and sharing some of the theoretical obstacles, these actions require different approaches: a general high-level task is composed of specific movements that depend on the environment and the nature of the task itself, while regular locomotion involves the generation of periodic trajectories of the limbs.
Separate planning and control architectures targeting these aspects of biped motion are designed and developed both from a theoretical and a practical standpoint, demonstrating their efficacy on the new humanoid robot COMAN+, built at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia.
The problem of interaction has been tackled by mimicking the intrinsic elasticity of human muscles, integrating active compliant controllers. However, while state-of-the-art robots may be endowed with compliant architectures, not many can withstand potential system failures that could compromise the safety of a human interacting with the robot. This thesis proposes an implementation of such low-level controller that guarantees a fail-safe behaviour, removing the threat that a humanoid robot could pose if a system failure occurred
Motor Control Insights on Walking Planner and its Stability
The application of biomechanic and motor control models in the control of
bidedal robots (humanoids, and exoskeletons) has revealed limitations of our
understanding of human locomotion. A recently proposed model uses the potential
energy for bipedal structures to model the bipedal dynamics, and it allows to
predict the system dynamics from its kinematics. This work proposes a
task-space planner for human-like straight locomotion that target application
of in rehabilitation robotics and computational neuroscience. The proposed
architecture is based on the potential energy model and employs locomotor
strategies from human data as a reference for human behaviour. The model
generates Centre of Mass (CoM) trajectories, foot swing trajectories and the
Base of Support (BoS) over time. The data show that the proposed architecture
can generate behaviour in line with human walking strategies for both the CoM
and the foot swing. Despite the CoM vertical trajectory being not as smooth as
a human trajectory, yet the proposed model significantly reduces the error in
the estimation of the CoM vertical trajectory compared to the inverted pendulum
models. The proposed model is also able to asses the stability based on the
body kinematics embedding in currently used in the clinical practice. However,
the model also implies a shift in the interpretation of the spatiotemporal
parameters of the gait, which are now determined by the conditions for the
equilibrium and not \textit{vice versa}. In other words, locomotion is a
dynamic reaching where the motor primitives are also determined by gravity
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