Highly dynamic locomotion control of biped robot enhanced by swing arms

TL;DR

This paper introduces a control strategy for bipedal robots that leverages swing arms to enhance agility, stability, and energy efficiency during dynamic locomotion, validated through simulations on a robot called Purple.

Contribution

It models the robot as a flywheel-spring loaded inverted pendulum and uses a whole-body controller to effectively integrate swing arms into dynamic locomotion control.

Findings

Agility increased by over 10% with swing arms.

Stabilization time reduced by half.

Energy consumption decreased by more than 20%.

Abstract

Swing arms have an irreplaceable role in promoting highly dynamic locomotion on bipedal robots by a larger angular momentum control space from the viewpoint of biomechanics. Few bipedal robots utilize swing arms and its redundancy characteristic of multiple degrees of freedom due to the lack of appropriate locomotion control strategies to perfectly integrate modeling and control. This paper presents a kind of control strategy by modeling the bipedal robot as a flywheel-spring loaded inverted pendulum (F-SLIP) to extract characteristics of swing arms and using the whole-body controller (WBC) to achieve these characteristics, and also proposes a evaluation system including three aspects of agility defined by us, stability and energy consumption for the highly dynamic locomotion of bipedal robots. We design several sets of simulation experiments and analyze the effects of swing arms according to the evaluation system during the jumping motion of Purple (Purple energy rises in the east)V1.0, a kind of bipedal robot designed to test high explosive locomotion. Results show that Purple's agility is increased by more than 10 percent, stabilization time is reduced by a factor of two, and energy consumption is reduced by more than 20 percent after introducing swing arms.