Acquisition of reaction force distributions for a walking humanoid robot

A method of acquiring reaction force distributions on a sole of a walking humanoid robot from ground is developed. The tactile sensors are embedded on the soles of a humanoid robot for the acquisition of the ground reaction force distributions. The tactile sensor consists of a pressure conductive rubber sheet put between upper and lower electrode arrays and was able to measure the reaction forces from 0.00 MPa to 0.05 MPa at all of the sensing elements. Force distribution data including 30 × 16 points can be obtained at a period of 20 ms by using RTLinux. It is shown that the ground reaction force distributions can experimentally be obtained by a humanoid robot "HOAP-I" and the locus of ZMP along walking of a humanoid robot is given. This information is useful for constructing feedback control loops or generating a new walking gait.