Walking Control for Humanoid Robot by the SC Approach

Conventional humanoid robots cannot achieve human-like walking patterns. The reason is that human walking patterns include singularity configurations, i.e. configurations with extended knees. Such kinematic singularities cause spurious joint motions. In other words, the humanoid robots cannot handle the singularity problem. On the other hand, humans make use of singularity configurations, because at such configurations large forces in certain directions can be generated. Therefore, singularities play an important role for creating efficient walking patterns. In our previous work, we proposed the Singularity Consistent (SC) Approach that can handle the singularity problem without instabilities. Until now, the approach has been applied to various manipulators. In this paper, we apply the SC approach to a walking pattern generator for a humanoid. Some issues and their solutions will be addressed. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach.