From Non-Reactive to Reactive Walking in Humanoid Robots

In this paper we report the implementation and the experimental validation of a controller to provide reactive walking gait capabilities of bipedal robots during the execution of predefined walking patterns. The proposed method is a cascade controller design to cope with external disturbances and to increase the robot stability. IMU states are used as inputs to generate modifications of the feet and the Center of Mass trajectories of the predefined walking gait. The method increases the walking stability minimizing the errors due to small terrain variations and external disturbances. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is validated in simulation and in real implementation on the full-body humanoid robot COMAN+.