Efficient Walking Speed Optimization of a Humanoid Robot

The development of optimized motions of humanoid robots that guarantee a fast and also stable walking is an important task especially in the context of autonomous soccer playing robots in RoboCup. We present a walking motion optimization approach for the humanoid robot prototype HR18 which is equipped with a low dimensional parameterized walking trajectory generator, joint motor controller and an internal stabilization. The robot is included as hardware-in-the-loop to define a low dimensional black-box optimization problem. In contrast to previously performed walking optimization approaches we apply a sequential surrogate optimization approach using stochastic approximation of the underlying objective function and sequential quadratic programming to search for a fast and stable walking motion. This is done under the conditions that only a small number of physical walking experiments should have to be carried out during the online optimization process. For the identified walking motion for the considered 55 cm tall humanoid robot we measured a forward walking speed of more than 30 cm/s. With a modified version of the robot even more than 40 cm/s could be achieved in permanent operation.