Walking stabilization based on gait analysis for biped humanoid robot

This study describes a biped walking stabilization based on gait analysis for a humanoid robot. So far, we have developed a humanoid robot as a human motion simulator which can quantitatively evaluate welfare and rehabilitation instruments instead of human subjects. However, the walking motion of the robot looked like humans in our past researches, but a walking stabilization control was not based on gait analysis. To use a humanoid robot as a human motion simulator, not only mechanisms but also a stabilizer should be designed based on human beings. Of course, there are many studies on gait analysis in the field of neuroscience, but most of them are not modeled enough to be implemented on humanoid robots. Therefore, first, we conducted gait analysis in this study, and we obtained following two findings: (i) a foot-landing point exists on the line joining the stance leg and the projected point of center of mass on the ground, and (ii) the distance between steps is modified to keep mechanical energy at the landing within a certain value. A walking stabilization control is designed based on the gait analysis. Verification of the proposed control is conducted through experiments with a human-sized humanoid robot WABIAN-2R.