Flexible foot design for a humanoid robot

Since a biped robot tends to tip over easily due to impacts, rough terrain or obstacle object, stable and reliable biped walking is a very important achievement. Well designed foot plays a crucial role in stabilization control for a humanoid robot. In this paper, we present a flexible foot design for our humanoid robot, including a landing impact absorption mechanism and a foot attitude estimation system. First, the mechanical design of the flexible foot is proposed. Rubber bushes and rubber pads are adopted for absorbing impacts. Then, the implementation of hardware and software for the foot attitude estimation system is presented. MEMS accelerometer and angular rate gyroscopes operate as dynamic inclination measurement sensors and a DSP is used for signal collecting and processing. Finally, the effectiveness of the developed flexible foot is confirmed by several experiments.