Adaptive Walking through Multi-Contact Stabilization and Usage of Partial Contacts for Humanoid Robots

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Within the last decades the social impact of robots increased steadily. While the manufacturing industry uses extremely specialized and highly efficient systems, different fields of application are targeted by humanoids, i.e. robots designed by mimicking the human anthropology. Potential future applications are rescue operations in disaster areas, home health care scenarios and the entertainment industry. Although humanoid robots often appear quite capable in literature and media, today even the most sophisticated systems can not keep up with the skills of a human being. This also holds for locomotion in unstructured environments outside of the laboratory, e.g. in disaster areas or in the middle of a crowd of humans. The flexibility, i.e. the ability to adapt its behavior to previously unknown and changing environments, proves to be a difficult task. This project aims to improve the locomotion of humanoid robots within such environments. For this purpose especially active arm usage for stabilization, e.g. supporting against walls, and partial foot/arm contact, e.g. while climbing stairs with narrow steps, is in the main focus. The overall problem splits into the areas perception and environment modeling, navigation and motion planning, as well as stabilization control. These areas are divided into subproblems, which are investigated cooperatively by the Chair of Applied Mechanics and the Chair for Computer Aided Medical Procedures & Augmented Reality of the Technical University of Munich. The tight cooperation allows to combine the expertise of both groups in order to achieve a common goal, namely improve locomotion capabilities of humanoid robots. Considering the practical application as a long term goal, special focus lies on efficient, real-time algorithms.