Planning walking patterns for a biped robot

Biped robots have better mobility than conventional wheeled robots, but the y tend to tip over easily. To be able to walk stably in various environment s, such as on rough terrain, up and down slopes, or in regions containing o bstacles, it is necessary for the robot to adapt to the ground conditions w ith a foot motion, and maintain its stability with a torso motion. When the ground conditions and stability constraint are satisfied, it is desirable to select a walking pattern that requires small torque and velocity of the joint actuators. In this paper, we first formulate the constraints of the f oot motion parameters. By varying the values of the constraint parameters, we can produce different types of foot motion to adapt to ground conditions . We then propose a method for formulating the problem of the smooth hip mo tion with the largest stability margin using only two parameters, and deriv e the hip trajectory by iterative computation. Finally, the correlation bet ween the actuator specifications and the walking patterns is described thro ugh simulation studies, and the effectiveness of the proposed methods is co nfirmed by simulation examples and experimental results.