Humanoid Robot HanSaRam: Recent Development and Compensation for the Landing Impact Force by Time Domain Passivity Approach

This paper briefs on an overview of recent progress and development in humanoid robot, HanSaRam series. HanSaRam (HSR) is a humanoid robot undergoing continual design and development in the Robot Intelligence Technology (RIT) Laboratory at KAIST since 2000. Currently HSR-VI, the latest version developed in 2004, is under experiment for on-line walking. In this paper, a method to reduce the landing impact/contact force is proposed for a stable dynamic walking. Humanoid robot might become unstable during the walking due to the impulsive contact force from the sudden landing of its foot. Therefore a new control method to decrease the landing impact force has been required. In this paper, the ground and the foot of the robot are modeled as two one-port network systems which are connected and exchange energy with each other. In addition, the time domain passivity controller, which has the landing impact force as input and foot’s position to trim off the force as output, is implemented. The small sized humanoid robot, HSR-VI, is developed to verify the proposed approach through dynamic walking experiments.