Development of a Leg Part of a Humanoid Robot - Development of a Biped Walking Robot Adapting to the Humans' Normal Living Floor

The authors are engaged in studies of biped walking robots from the following two viewpoints. One is a viewpoint as a human science. The other is a viewpoint towards the development of humanoid robots. In this paper, the authors introduce an anthropomorphic dynamic biped walking robot adapting to the humans' living floor. The robot has two remarkable systems: (1) a special foot system to obtain the position relative to the landing surface and the gradient of the surface during its dynamic walking; (2) an adaptive walking control system to adapt to the path surfaces with unknown shapes by utilizing the information of the landing surface, obtained by the foot system. Two units of the foot system WAF-3 were produced, a biped walking robot WL-12RVII that had the foot system and the adaptive walking control system installed inside it was developed, and a walking experiment with WL-12RVII was performed. As a result, dynamic biped walking adapting to humans' floors with unknown shapes was realized. The maximum walking speed was 1.28 s/step with a 0.3 m step length, and the adaptable deviation range was from -16 to +16 mm/step in the vertical direction, and from -3 to +3° in the tilt angle.