• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.34 no.6
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• pp.683-693
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• 2010

In this paper, we propose a new parallel mechanism for the legs of biped robots and the control of the robot's locomotion. A leg consists of two 3-DOF parallel platforms linked serially: one is an orientation platform for a thigh and the other is the 3-DOF asymmetric parallel platform for the shank. The desired locomotion trajectory is generated on the basis of the Gravity-Compensated Inverted Pendulum Mode (GCIPM) in the sagittal direction and the Linear Inverted Pendulum Mode (LIPM) in the lateral direction, respectively. In order to simulate the ground reaction force, a 6-DOF elastic pad model is used underneath each of the soles. The performance and effectiveness of the proposed parallel mechanism and locomotion control are shown by the results of computer simulations of a 12-DOF parallel biped robot using $SimMechanics^{(R)}$.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.33 no.10
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• pp.1014-1022
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• 2009

A biped robot in locomotion can be regarded to be kinetically redundant in that the link-chain from its foot on the ground to its swing foot has more degrees of freedom that needed to realize stable bipedal locomotion. This paper proposes a new method to generate a trajectory for bipedal locomotion based on this redundancy, which directly generates a locomotion trajectory at the joint level unlike some other methods such as LIPM (linear inverted-pendulum mode) and GCIPM (gravity-compensated inverted-pendulum mode), each of which generates a trajectory of the center of gravity or the hip link under the assumption of the dominance of the hip-link inertia before generating the trajectory of the whole links at the joint level. For the stability of the trajectory generated in the proposed method, a stability condition based on the ZMP (zero-moment point) is used as a constraint as well as other kinetic constraints for bipedal motions. A 6-DOF biped robot is used to show how a stable locomotion trajectory can be generated in the sagittal plane by the proposed method and to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method.

• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.612-620
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• 2006

This paper proposes an optimal trajectory generation method for biped robots for walking up-and-down stairs using a Real-Coded Genetic Algorithm (RCGA). The RCGA is most effective in minimizing the total consumption energy of a multi-dof biped robot. Each joint angle trajectory is defined as a 4-th order polynomial of which the coefficients are chromosomes or design variables to approximate the walking gait. Constraints are divided into equalities and inequalities. First, equality constraints consist of initial conditions and repeatability conditions with respect to each joint angle and angular velocity at the start and end of a stride period. Next, inequality constraints include collision prevention conditions of a swing leg, singular prevention conditions, and stability conditions. The effectiveness of the proposed optimal trajectory is shown in computer simulations with a 6-dof biped robot model that consists of seven links in the sagittal plane. The optimal trajectory is more efficient than that generated by the Modified Gravity-Compensated Inverted Pendulum Mode (MGCIPM). And various trajectories generated by the proposed GA method are analyzed from the viewpoint of the consumption energy: walking on even ground, ascending stairs, and descending stairs.