Humanoid Robot Co-Design: Coupling Hardware Design with Gait Generation via Hybrid Zero Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a systematic co-design framework for humanoid robots and their walking gaits using hybrid zero dynamics, enabling simultaneous optimization of robot parameters and gait stability for improved energy efficiency.

Contribution

It presents a novel co-design method coupling robot hardware parameters with gait generation via hybrid zero dynamics, streamlining the design process.

Findings

Successfully co-designed a humanoid robot ADAM with optimized limb parameters.

Achieved energy-efficient bipedal locomotion through integrated design and gait optimization.

Demonstrated the framework's effectiveness in generating stable walking gaits.

Abstract

Selecting robot design parameters can be challenging since these parameters are often coupled with the performance of the controller and, therefore, the resulting capabilities of the robot. This leads to a time-consuming and often expensive process whereby one iterates between designing the robot and manually evaluating its capabilities. This is particularly challenging for bipedal robots, where it can be difficult to evaluate the behavior of the system due to the underlying nonlinear and hybrid dynamics. Thus, in an effort to streamline the design process of bipedal robots, and maximize their performance, this paper presents a systematic framework for the co-design of humanoid robots and their associated walking gaits. To this end, we leverage the framework of hybrid zero dynamic (HZD) gait generation, which gives a formal approach to the generation of dynamic walking gaits. The key novelty of this paper is to consider both virtual constraints associated with the actuators of the robot, coupled with design virtual constraints that encode the associated parameters of the robot to be designed. These virtual constraints are combined in an HZD optimization problem which simultaneously determines the design parameters while finding a stable walking gait that minimizes a given cost function. The proposed approach is demonstrated through the design of a novel humanoid robot, ADAM, wherein its thigh and shin are co-designed so as to yield energy efficient bipedal locomotion.