Bipedal Walking with Toe-off, Heel-strike and Compliance with External Disturbances

Both disturbance rejection and human-like motions, like toe-off and heel-strike, are important for a biped robot to enhance its performance. However, the required motions for them may influence each other, which is why few studies consider them simultaneously. This paper presents a method to realize stable walking with toe-off and heel-strike even when the robot experiences disturbances. We propose a walking controller which can constrain the desired ground reaction force. On the one hand, the controller can adjust the torso acceleration to make the supporting leg compliant with the external disturbances on the torso. On the other hand, it can rotate the supporting foot by adjusting the ZMP to an appropriate location. The linear inverted pendulum is utilized to generate the CoM trajectory and the foot placement. Meanwhile, its ZMP can be predefined as required so that the toe-off and heel-strike can be achieved by the controller. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by simulations.