Toe Joints that Enhance Bipedal and Fullbody Motion of Humanoid Robots

This paper addresses the extention of humanoid's action capability by attatching toe joints. E ectiveness of toe joints is discussed in three aspects. One is utilizing it to speed up the walking, another is using it to enable a humanoid to go up heigher steps, and the other is using it to whole-body action in which knees are contacting to the ground. Feet with toe joints are developed for Humanoid `H6'. An experiment of the wholebody action in which knees are contacting to the gound is carried out to show the usefulness of toe joints for such actions. Then walking pattern generation system is extended to use toe joints. Using this extended system, maximum speed of knee joints can be reduced at the same walking speed, and 80% faster walking speed is achieved on humanoid `H6'.