Design of Walking Gaits for Tao-Pie-Pie, a Small Humanoid Robot

This paper describes the methodology that we used to design and implement balancing and walking gaits for TAO-PIE-PIE, a small 30cm tall humanoid robot. TAO-PIE-PIE is a fully autonomous robot with all power, sensing, and processing done on-board. It is also a minimalistic design with only six degrees of freedom. Nevertheless, its performance is comparable to that of other more complex designs. The paper describes three patterns: (a) a straight walk, (b) a turn on the spot, and (c) a kicking pattern. Sensor feedback is provided by two gyroscopes that provide angular velocity in the left-right and forward-backward plane and a CMOS camera providing vision information. The feedback from the gyroscopes is not used to directly control the walking gait, because the signal is noisy and it would be computationally too expensive for the current processor hardware. Instead, coarse feedback from the gyroscopes is used to monitor the transition from one phase of the pattern to the next. This feedback is used to: (a) determine when a phase has completed successfully, and (b) when to change the endpoints of certain phases. TAO-PIE-PIE proved to be a successful design winning a number of honors at international competitions.