Fast Dynamic Walking with RH5 Humanoid Robot

Humanoid robots have the potential of becoming general purpose robots augmenting the human work-force in industries. However, they must match the agility and versatility of humans. It is particularly challenging for humanoids actuated with electric drives to achieve that as one must strive for the right balance between mass-inertial distribution in the robot as well as velocity and force transmissions in its actuation concept. In addition to optimal design of the robot, the control system must be designed to exploit the full potential of the robot. In this paper, we perform experimental investigations on the dynamic walking capabilities of a series-parallel hybrid humanoid named RH5. We demonstrate that it is possible to walk up to speeds of 0.43 m/s with a position controlled robot without full state feedback which makes it one of the fastest walking humanoids with similar size and actuation modalities. Video of the experiments is available at: https://youtu.be/39GL2vPedGY