Abstract
An experimental and theoretical study of real-time robot balancing on inclined surfaces with electrical feedback circuitry is presented. Force sensors are experimentally shown to extend the sustainability of a stable robot posture beyond a critical surface inclination. For this purpose, the inclination feedback from the force sensors is used to adjust the robot's ankle-pitch-motor angle above the critical inclination, thus enabling the maintenance of a stable robot posture. Further, the Inverted Pendulum Model (IPM) (Hemami and Golliday, 1977, Hemami et al., 1973, and McGhee and Kuhner, 1969) is extended to the case of inclined surfaces. Through application of this extended IPM it is demonstrated, that simultaneous use of gyro-sensor data can minimize the necessary initial adjustment of the motor angle for controlled robot-body rotation, which additionally has the positive effect of reducing possible overshoots of the motor's rotation angle during feedback. Consequently, the reported feedback control improves the robot-body stability on inclined surfaces. Efficient implementation of the developed control scheme into an existing robot's electrical system is proposed.
Highlights
Robots have been developed and utilized for reducing the necessity of direct human labor in various sectors of the society
Humanoid robots are desirable for directly supporting many needs related to the human existence, and their deployment is planned in various fields of the human society, where dynamical walking with high degrees of freedom similar to human beings becomes necessary
WORK Our focus has been given on the robot-stability maintenance on inclined surfaces, by investigating the robot motion on such inclined surfaces experimentally as well as theoretically
Summary
Robots have been developed and utilized for reducing the necessity of direct human labor in various sectors of the society. The case of a “blind” humanoid robot, without any camera to sense the environment, can be a worst-case scenario for robot-stability control [16,17,18] In such a case, the surface interaction with force/torque sensors, integrated under the robot feet [16], becomes an important information source for assuring robustness and stability of the robot. A major implementation problem for such software-based control methods in light-weight robots is the required hardware complexity and the high necessary processing power. Tamura et al [41] proposed a stability control for light-weight humanoid robots without calculating the robot’s ZMP, avoiding the calculation overhead and the effect of ZMP-calculationinduced joint-angle-determination noise during robot stabilization on inclined surfaces.
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