Bipedal Walking with Corrective Actions in the Tilt Phase Space

TL;DR

This paper presents a low-cost, portable feedback control method for bipedal robots that stabilizes gait using tilt phase space data from a single IMU sensor, effective across different robot types.

Contribution

Introduces a model-free, computationally inexpensive feedback controller utilizing tilt phase space for bipedal robot stabilization, suitable for low-cost robots.

Findings

Effective in simulation and real hardware tests

Requires only a single IMU sensor

Highly portable across different robot platforms

Abstract

Many methods exist for a bipedal robot to keep its balance while walking. In addition to step size and timing, other strategies are possible that influence the stability of the robot without interfering with the target direction and speed of locomotion. This paper introduces a multifaceted feedback controller that uses numerous different feedback mechanisms, collectively termed corrective actions, to stabilise a core keypoint-based gait. The feedback controller is experimentally effective, yet free of any physical model of the robot, very computationally inexpensive, and requires only a single 6-axis IMU sensor. Due to these low requirements, the approach is deemed to be highly portable between robots, and was specifically also designed to target lower cost robots that have suboptimal sensing, actuation and computational resources. The IMU data is used to estimate the yaw-independent tilt orientation of the robot, expressed in the so-called tilt phase space, and is the source of all feedback provided by the controller. Experimental validation is performed in simulation as well as on real robot hardware.