Human-like walking patterns with pelvic rotation for a humanoid robot

Fast and stable walking is one of the important prerequisite for humanoid robots to serve the people. Pelvic rotations play a significant role when one walks fast. This paper proposes a method to generate human-like walking patterns with pelvic rotation in the transverse plane for a humanoid robot to effectively improve its quickness and stability. First, the regularities of pelvic rotation in the transverse plane during human walking are studied. Second, the mechanism design of a humanoid robot waist for pelvic rotations is presented. Then, a walking trajectory planning with pelvic rotation to improve the stability margin is proposed. Finally, the effectiveness of the method is demonstrated through simulations and experiments on BHR-5.

I. Introduction

The research of humanoid robots has been popular in robotics due to the ability to adapt to the human environment. Humanoid robots are expected to assist and serve the people, necessitating the ability of stable walking and running, whole-body coordinate motion, accurate and complicated manipulations and so on. Thanks to the great efforts of researchers, some basic principles and key techniques are solved [1]–[7] and several advanced platforms are developed, such as WABIAN [8], AISMO [9], HRP [10], H7 [11] and so on.