Development of a dynamic biped walking system for humanoid - development of a biped walking robot adapting to the humans' living floor

In this paper, the authors introduce an anthropomorphic dynamic biped walking robot adapting to the humans' living floor. The robot has two systems: 1) a special foot system to obtain the position relative to a landing surface and the gradient of the surface during its dynamic walking; 2) an adaptive walking control system to adapt to the path surfaces with unknown shapes by utilising the information of landing surface, obtained by the foot system. Two units of the foot system WAF-3 have been developed: a biped walking robot WL-12RVII that has the foot system and the adaptive walking control system installed inside it. A walking experiment with the WL-12RVII was performed. As a result, dynamic biped walking adapting to humans' living floor with unknown shape was realised. The maximum walking speed was 1.28 s/step with a 0.3 m step length, and the adaptable deviation range was from -16 to 16 mm/step in the vertical direction, and from -3 to +3/spl deg/ in the tilt angle.