Realization of biped walking on soft ground with stabilization control based on gait analysis

This paper describes a walking stabilization control on a soft ground based on gait analysis for a humanoid robot. There are many researches on gait analysis on a hard ground, but few scientists analyze the walking ability of human beings on a soft ground. Therefore, we conducted anthropometric measurement using a motion capture system on a soft ground. By analyzing experimental data, we obtained two findings. The first finding is that although there are no significant differences in step width and step length, step height tends to increase to avoid the collision between the feet and a soft ground. The second finding is that there are no significant differences in the lateral CoM trajectories but the vertical CoM amplitude increases when walking on a soft ground. Based on these findings, we developed a walking stabilization control to stabilize the CoM motion in the lateral direction on a soft ground. Verification of the proposed control is conducted through experiments with a human-sized humanoid robot WABIAN-2R. The experimental videos are supplemented.