Online Balance Controllers for a Hopping and Running Humanoid Robot

This paper describes online balance controllers for running in a humanoid robot and verifies the validity of the proposed controllers via experiments. To realize running in the humanoid robot, the overall control structure is composed of an offline controller and an online controller. The main purpose of the online controller is to maintain dynamic stability while the humanoid robot hops or runs. The online controller is composed of the posture balance control in the sagittal plane, the transient balance control in the frontal plane and the swing ankle pitch compensator in the sagittal plane. The posture balance controller makes the robot maintain balance using an inertial measurement unit sensor in the sagittal plane. The transient balance controller makes the robot keep its balance in the frontal plane using gyros attached to each upper leg. The swing ankle pitch compensator prevents the swing foot from hitting the ground at unexpected times while the robot runs forward. HUBO2 was used for the running experiment. It was designed for the running experiment, and is lighter and more powerful than the previous walking robot platform, HUBO. With the proposed controllers, HUBO2 ran forward stably at a maximum speed of 3.24 km/h and this result verified the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. In addition, in order to show the contribution of the stability, the running performance according to the existence of each controller was described by experiment.

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