Trajectory generation with natural ZMP references for the biped walking robot SURALP

Bipedal locomotion has good obstacle avoidance properties. A robot with human appearance has advantages in human-robot communication. However, walking control is difficult due to the complex robot dynamics involved. Stable reference generation is significant in walking control. The Linear Inverted Pendulum Model (LIPM) and the Zero Moment Point (ZMP) criterion are applied in a number of studies for stable walking reference generation of biped robots. This is the main route of reference generation in this paper too. We employ a natural and continuous ZMP reference trajectory for a stable and human-like walk. The ZMP reference trajectories move forward under the sole of the support foot when the robot body is supported by a single leg. Robot center of mass (CoM) trajectory is obtained from predefined ZMP reference trajectories by Fourier series approximation. We reported simulation results with this algorithm in our previous works. This paper presents the first experimental results. Also the use of a ground push phase before foot take-offs reported in our previous works is tested first time together with our ZMP based reference trajectory. The reference generation strategy is tested via walking experiments on the 29 degrees-of-freedom (DOF) human sized full body humanoid robot SURALP (Sabanci University Robotics Research Laboratory Platform). Experiments indicate that the proposed reference trajectory generation technique is successful.