Human-Inspired Control of Bipedal Walking Robots

Abstract

This paper presents a human-inspired control approach to bipedal robotic walking: utilizing human data and output functions that appear to be intrinsic to human walking in order to formally design controllers that provably result in stable robotic walking. Beginning with human walking data, outputs-or functions of the kinematics-are determined that result in a low-dimensional representation of human locomotion. These same outputs can be considered on a robot, and human-inspired control is used to drive the outputs of the robot to the outputs of the human. The main results of this paper are that, in the case of both under and full actuation, the parameters of this controller can be determined through a human-inspired optimization problem that provides the best fit of the human data while simultaneously provably guaranteeing stable robotic walking for which the initial condition can be computed in closed form. These formal results are demonstrated in simulation by considering two bipedal robots-an underactuated 2-D bipedal robot, AMBER, and fully actuated 3-D bipedal robot, NAO-for which stable robotic walking is automatically obtained using only human data. Moreover, in both cases, these simulated walking gaits are realized experimentally to obtain human-inspired bipedal walking on the actual robots.