Achieving a stable, human-like gait with a humanoid robot is a challenging problem. While several rather simple as well as more complex techniques exist to generate stable walking patterns, only little attention has been paid towards the resemblance to the human gait. Popular gaits, for example, apply the strategy to bend the knees and to swing the torso in lateral direction in order to ensure ...

Locomotion and navigation of a surface walking/climbing robot – Planar Walker, based on a novel planar 8-bar mechanism are studied. The robot moves on a surface through decoupled transverse gaits and turning gaits with finite lengths and finite rotation angles. Motions of the gaits are modeled using planar rigid motion group SE(2). Three point-topoint navigation methods are developed for variou...

A substantial portion of the Earth is inaccessible to any sort of wheeled mechanism— natural obstacles like large rocks, loose soil, deep ravines, and steep slopes conspire to render rolling locomotion ineffective. Hills, mountains, shores, seabeds, as well as the moon and other planets present similar terrain challenges. In many of these natural terrains, legs are well-suited. They can avoid s...

A novel eccentric paddle mechanism based on the epicyclic gear mechanism (ePaddle-EGM) has been proposed to enhance the mobility of amphibious robot for multi-terrain tasks with diverse locomotion gaits. This paper presents a brief description for this mechanism. Based on the feature of ePaddle-EGM, a unique non-reciprocating legged gait planning method is proposed. This method could minimize t...

This chapter presents further investigations into the period-three route to chaos exhibited in the passive dynamic walking of the compass-gait biped robot as it goes down an inclined surface. This discovered kind of route in the passive bipedal locomotion was found to coexist with the conventional period-one passive hybrid limit cycle. The further analysis on the period-three route chaos is rea...

In this paper, we propose a scheme for fault detection and tolerance of the hexapod robot locomotion on even terrain. The fault stability margin is defined to represent potential stability which a gait can have in case a sudden fault event occurs to one leg. Based on this, the fault-tolerant quadruped periodic gaits of the hexapod walking over perfectly even terrain are derived. It is demonstra...

The design of a knee joint is a key issue in robotics and biomechanics to improve the compatibility between prosthesis and human movements, and to improve the bipedal robot performances. We propose a novel design for the knee joint of a planar bipedal robot, based on a four-bar linkage. The dynamic model of the planar bipedal robot is calculated. Two kinds of cyclic walking gaits are considered...

In a dynamic operational environment of human-robot interaction, awareness of the interacting human state and activity is essential to the decision making of the robotic system. We present our approach by illustrating its application in a particularly challenging context of human-robot co-working supported by our Human Sensory System, for measuring physiological data during robot-assisted gait ...

Legged robots are especially suited for traversing unstructured terrain outdoors. To maintain efficient locomotion, it is necessary to use appropriate gait parameters informed by terrain interactions such as slipping and sinking. Humans and legged animals inherently use this skill when walking. Effectively characterising the terrain with proprioceptive sensing provides information to the robot ...