Experimental Studies of a Neural Oscillator for Biped Locomotion with QRIO

Recently, there has been a growing interest in biologically inspired biped locomotion control with Central Pattern Generator (CPG). However, few experimental attempts on real hardware 3D humanoid robots have yet been made. Our goal in this paper is to present our achievement of 3D biped locomotion using a neural oscillator applied to a humanoid robot, QRIO. We employ reduced number of neural oscillators as the CPG model, along with a task space Cartesian coordinate system and utilizing entrainment property to establish stable walking gait. We verify robustness against lateral perturbation, through numerical simulation of stepping motion in place along the lateral plane. We then implemented it on the QRIO. It could successfully cope with unknown 3mm bump by autonomously adjusting its stepping period. Sagittal motion produced by a neural oscillator is introduced, and then overlapped with the lateral motion generator in realizing 3D biped locomotion on a QRIO humanoid robot.

[1]  Matthew M. Williamson,et al.  Neural control of rhythmic arm movements , 1998, Neural Networks.

[2]  David L. Boothe,et al.  Sensorimotor Interactions During Locomotion: Principles Derived from Biological Systems , 1999, Auton. Robots.

[3]  Shinya Kotosaka,et al.  Synchronized Robot Drumming by Neural Oscillator , 2001 .

[4]  Shin Ishii,et al.  Reinforcement Learning for Biped Locomotion , 2002, ICANN.

[5]  Akio Ishiguro,et al.  Neuromodulated Control of Bipedal Locomotion Using a Polymorphic CPG Circuit , 2003, Adapt. Behav..

[6]  Jun Morimoto,et al.  Minimax differential dynamic programming: application to a biped walking robot , 2003, SICE 2003 Annual Conference (IEEE Cat. No.03TH8734).

[7]  Kiyotoshi Matsuoka,et al.  Sustained oscillations generated by mutually inhibiting neurons with adaptation , 1985, Biological Cybernetics.

[8]  Kosei Ishimura,et al.  Emergence of Biped Robot Locomotion through Neural Entrainment , 2004 .

[9]  Jun Morimoto,et al.  An empirical exploration of a neural oscillator for biped locomotion control , 2004, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2004. Proceedings. ICRA '04. 2004.

[10]  Jun Morimoto,et al.  A simple reinforcement learning algorithm for biped walking , 2004, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2004. Proceedings. ICRA '04. 2004.

[11]  Aude Billard,et al.  Biologically Inspired Adaptive Dynamic Walking of a Quadruped Robot , 2004 .

[12]  Gentaro Taga,et al.  A model of the neuro-musculo-skeletal system for human locomotion , 1995, Biological Cybernetics.

[13]  Gentaro Taga,et al.  A model of the neuro-musculo-skeletal system for human locomotion , 1995, Biological Cybernetics.

[14]  Jun Morimoto,et al.  Learning Sensory Feedback to CPG with Policy Gradient for Biped Locomotion , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.