Master-Slave Bipedal Walking and Semi-Automatic Standing Up of Humanoid Robots

This paper proposes a bipedal walking method and a standing-up method for master-slave humanoid robots. The methods can be used with a pair of inexpensive master devices, which are 3-DoF haptic devices with some auxiliary buttons. The user's commands through the master devices are reflected in the motion of the robot's legs to be able to make the robot locomote stably at the user's will. During the walking, the height and the attitude of the robot torso are normally maintained constant, but are allowed to vary without affecting the balance when the user intends to make a long stride. The user is also able to take over the control of the robot's arms. When the robot falls, the proposed method allows the user to use the arms to make the robot stand up, being assisted by a semi-automatic motion planner. The methods have been tested with our interactive/realtime simulation environment.