A sensory reflexive control for humanoid walking

Since a biped humanoid inherently suffers from instability and always risks tipping over, ensuring high stability and reliability of its walk is one of the most important goals. The paper proposes a sensory reflexive control for humanoid walking. The sensory reflex is a simple, but rapid motion programmed in respect to sensory information. The sensory reflex, we propose in the paper, consists of body posture control, zero moment point control, and landing time control. With the sensory reflex, it is possible for the humanoid to adapt itself to environmental uncertainties. The effectiveness of our proposed method was confirmed by walk experiments of an actual 26 DOF humanoid on an unknown rough terrain and in the presence of disturbances.