This paper deals with the real-time stable walking for a humanoid robot, ISHURO-II, on uneven terrain. A humanoid robot necessitates achieving posture stabilization since it has basic problems such as structural instability. In this paper, a stabilization algorithm is proposed using the ground reaction forces, which are measured using FSR (Force Sensing Resistor) sensors during walking, and the...

The main objective of this article is to optimize the walking pattern of a 2D humanoid robot with heel-off and toe-off motions in order to minimize the energy consumption and maximize the stability margin. To this end, at first, a gait planning method is introduced based on the ankle and hip joint position trajectories. Then, using these trajectories and the inverse kinematics, the position tra...

A leg-wheel robot with four mechanically separated legs and two wheels is highly mobile and stable on rough terrain. We discuss the strategy for the robot movement over large rough terrain, classifying topographical features into 13 patterns of combined terrain surface. To traverse all classified terrain, we propose three adaptive gaits: (1) Step-up gait in which frontfoot landing is higher tha...

This paper investigates the use of semantic information to link ground-level occupancy maps and aerial images. A ground-level semantic map is obtained by a mobile robot equipped with an omnidirectional camera, differential GPS and a laser range finder. The mobile robot uses a virtual sensor for building detection (based on omnidirectional images) to compute the ground-level semantic map, which ...

This paper presents some of the ground mobile robots under development at the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa) at Virginia Tech that use biologically inspired novel locomotion strategies. By studying nature's models and then imitating or taking inspiration from these designs and processes, we apply and implement new ways for mobile robots to move. Unlike most ground mobile robots tha...

This thesis presents a novel locomotion technique, called legless locomotion, for convex-bodied legged robots. The motivation for studying legless locomotion stems from the mobile robot recovery problem, stated simply as what should a robot do when trapped? Legless locomotion is the technique of locomotion for a legged robot which has no leg-ground contact, but can use the swinging legs to exci...

Parametric excitation walking is one of the bipedal gait generation methods on level ground. This method was first applied to a biped robot with telescopic legs and later to a kneed biped robot. An experimental robot with telescopic legs was also developed and it was verified that the robot could walk more than eight steps by the parametric excitation walking. Recently, we have developed an exp...

Methods for measuring or estimating ground shape by a laser range finder and a vision sensor (Exteroceptive sensors) have critical weaknesses in terms that these methods need a prior database built to distinguish acquired data as unique surface conditions for driving. Also, ground information by Exteroceptive sensors does not reflect the deflection of ground surface caused by the movement of UG...

In the development of a wearable robot for locomotion, fall prevention is an important problem. In this study, we propose a fall prevention control of a wearable robot using ground reaction force sensors which measure 3-axis ground reaction force and position of center of pressure. We conducted a measurement experiment to evaluate user’s compensation for backward instability during walking with...

We report on a continuous time odometry scheme for a walking hexapod robot built upon a previously developed leg-strain based body pose estimator. We implement this estimation procedure and odometry scheme on the robot RHex and evaluate its performance at widely varying speeds and over different ground conditions by means of a 6 degree of freedom vision based ground truth measurement system (GT...