Study of an external passive shock-absorbing mechanism for walking robots

This paper proposes a compliant sole as an external shock-absorbing mechanism and investigates its effect comparatively to an ankle-located joint-flexible mechanism. The proposed mechanism is mounted under the HRP-2 humanoid feet only using simulation. The comparative evaluation has been conducted for contact resulting from walking using the HRP-2 embedded pattern-generator. The characteristics of the sole material, Young and Poisson coefficients, are set following an ad-hoc minimization of their influence on the vertical acceleration and lateral inclination. Preliminary results suggest that the solution proposed is worth to be considered further and to be developed for real application use.

[1]  Fethi Ben Ouezdou,et al.  Dynamic walk of a bipedal robot having flexible feet , 2001, Proceedings 2001 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Expanding the Societal Role of Robotics in the the Next Millennium (Cat. No.01CH37180).

[2]  Shuuji Kajita,et al.  Constraint-based dynamics simulator for humanoid robots with shock absorbing mechanisms , 2007, 2007 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[3]  Kazuhito Yokoi,et al.  Interactive Dynamic Simulator for Humanoid With Haptic Feedback , 2008 .

[4]  Kazuhito Yokoi,et al.  UKEMI: falling motion control to minimize damage to biped humanoid robot , 2002, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[5]  David Baraff,et al.  Fast contact force computation for nonpenetrating rigid bodies , 1994, SIGGRAPH.

[6]  Gordon Cheng,et al.  Examining human walking characteristics with a telescopic compass-like biped walker model , 2004, 2004 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37583).

[7]  S. A. Stoeter,et al.  Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation , 2003 .

[8]  Olivier Stasse,et al.  Modular Architecture for Humanoid Walking Pattern Prototyping and Experiments , 2008, Adv. Robotics.

[9]  Atsuo Takanishi,et al.  Experimental development of a foot mechanism with shock absorbing material for acquisition of landing surface position information and stabilization of dynamic biped walking , 1995, Proceedings of 1995 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[10]  Fumio Kanehiro,et al.  Humanoid robot HRP-2 , 2008, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2004. Proceedings. ICRA '04. 2004.

[11]  Atsuo Takanishi,et al.  Multisensor foot mechanism with shock absorbing material for dynamic biped walking adapting to unknown uneven surfaces , 1996, 1996 IEEE/SICE/RSJ International Conference on Multisensor Fusion and Integration for Intelligent Systems (Cat. No.96TH8242).

[12]  Kazuhito Yokoi,et al.  Dynamic simulator for humanoids using constraint-based method with static friction , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics.

[13]  Christian Duriez,et al.  Realistic haptic rendering of interacting deformable objects in virtual environments , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[14]  T. Takenaka,et al.  The development of Honda humanoid robot , 1998, Proceedings. 1998 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.98CH36146).