SCGT: A Three-step Smooth and Consecutive Gait Transition Approach for Biped Robots

Biped robots have gained much interest in the last decades, and gait planning is critical for biped robots to obtain stable walking on different terrains. Many studies have been carried out on the gait planning of biped robots on every terrain, such as ground, stairs, and slopes, but few studies have been carried out on the gait transitions among different terrains. This paper proposes a smooth and consecutive gait transition (SCGT) approach for biped robots to generate gait patterns from the level ground to the stairs and ensure walking stability. The proposed approach uses the linear inverted pendulum model to model the dynamics of biped robots and employs the concept of capturability with energy zone to generate optimal foot locations while the robots walk from level ground to stairs. After that, the gait transition from the level ground to the stairs is generated by the constructed optimization with the constraints of the robot’s kinematics, the walking speed, and the height of the stairs. The proposed approach has been tested with our robot model, MX1, in different scenes; the experimental results indicate that the proposed approach can generate adaptive gait patterns for different walking speeds and stairs with different heights. Meanwhile, walking stability and continuity can be ensured when walking from level ground to the stairs.