Fast running experiments involving a humanoid robot

The present paper describes an implementation of fast running motions involving a humanoid robot. Two important technologies are described: a motion generation and a balance control. The motion generation is a unified way to design both walking and running and can generate the trajectory with the vertical conditions of the Center Of Mass (COM) in short calculation time. The balance control enables a robot to maintain balance by changing the positions of the contact foot dynamically when the robot is disturbed. This control consists of 1) compliance control without force sensors, in which the joints are made compliant by feed-forward torques and adjustment of gains of position control, and 2) feedback control, which uses the measured orientation of the robot's torso used in the motion generation as an initial condition to decide the foot positions. Finally, a human-sized humanoid robot that can run forward at 7.0 km/h is presented.