Employing a Novel Gait Pattern Generator on a Social Humanoid Robot

This paper presents a novel Gait Pattern Generator developed for the “Alice” social humanoid robot whichup to now lacked an appropriate walking pattern. Due to the limitations of this robot, the proposed gatepattern generator was formulated based on a nine-mass model to decrease the modeling errors; and theinverse kinematics of the whole lower-body was solved in such a way that the robot remains staticallystable during the movements. The main challenge of this work was to solve the inverse kinematics of a7-link chain with 12 degrees-of-freedom. For this purpose, a new graphical-numerical technique has beenprovided using the definition of the kinematic equations of the robot joints’ Cartesian coordinates. Thismethod resulted in a significant increase in the calculations’ solution rate. Finally, a novel algorithm wasdeveloped for step-by-step displacement of the robot towards a desired destination in a two-dimensionalspace. Performance of the proposed gate pattern generator was evaluated both with a model of the robot ina MATLAB Simulink environment and in real experiments with the Alice humanoid robot.