Investigation of a non-anthropomorphic bipedal robot with stability, agility, and simplicity

This paper presents a novel bipedal robot concept and prototype that takes inspiration from humanoids but features fundamental differences that drastically improve its agility and stability while reducing its complexity and cost. This Non-Anthropomorphic Bipedal Robotic System (NABiRoS) modifies the traditional bipedal form by aligning the legs in the sagittal plane and adding a compliance to the feet. The platform is comparable in height to a human, but weighs much less because of its lightweight architecture and novel leg configuration. The inclusion of the compliant element showed immense improvements in the stability and robustness of walking gaits on the prototype, allowing the robot to remain stable during locomotion without any inertial feedback control. NABiRoS was able to achieve walking speeds of up to 0.75km/h (0.21m/s) using a simple pre-processed ZMP based gait and a positioning accuracy of +/− 0.04m with a preprocessed quasi-static algorithm.