Abstract:

The main objective of this thesis is to improve the performance and extent the flexibility of a humanoid robot walking on unknown rough terrain with given locomotion patterns. The momentum compensation is adopted for reducing the rotational slip of locomotion by upper body. Considering several types of walking, the corresponding adjustments of momentum compensation are made. The gait coordination is developed for dynamic balancing with given trajectory sets. By combing landing modification and ankle-based stabilization controllers, the simulation results show that it can improve the stability of locomotion when walking with disturbances. A biped mechanism with trunk is designed and fabricated for the construction of a humanoid robot prototype, which is used as a platform to verify the proposed approaches. The distributed control architecture using USB and CAN bus is developed. Practical implementations and the basic scenario of locomotion are conducted to integrate the motor control with the communication protocol developed in the proposed distributed control architecture for autonomous operations.