Design and construction of a series of compact humanoid robots and development of biped walk control strategies

Design and construction of compact body humanoid robots and various biped l ocomotion control strategies implemented onto them in the ESYS humanoid pro ject at the Engineering Systems Laboratory are presented. Design concepts a nd hardware specifications of the constructed compact size humanoid robots from Mk.1 to Mk.5 are discussed. As for the biped walk control, four biped locomotion control strategies all of which have various advantages such as versatility, high-energy efficiency, smooth loading on hardware, and real-t ime gait generation, are proposed. 3D biped dynamic walking of the construc ted humanoids is realized by implementing the proposed biped control strate gies onto them. Results of evaluation experiments on the proposed control s trategies are reported. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.