A novel 6-DoF biped active walking robot — Walking gaits, patterns and experiments

Combining the advantages of active and passive walking robots, we have developed a novel active biped walking robot with only six DoFs. The robot is built with six 1-DoF joint modules and two wheels as the feet. It achieves locomotion in special gaits different from those of traditional biped robots. In this paper, this novel biped robot is introduced, and four walking gaits, namely turning-around gait, foot-wheel hybrid gait, side-stepping gait and turning-over gait are proposed, and their walking patterns and motion planning are presented and analyzed. Walking experiments are carried out to verify the locomotion function, the effectiveness of the presented gaits and to illustrate the features of this novel biped robot. It has been shown that biped active walking may be achieved with only a few DoFs and simple kinematic configuration.