Walking on the slopes with tactile sensing system for humanoid robot

This paper presents a tactile sensing system for humanoid robot and an active tactile sensing technique to enable the humanoid robot to walk on the slopes autonomously. We introduce a novel method of walking pattern generation by applying the proposed technique to the biped humanoid robot. Our aim is to simplify the walking control by utilizing a real time tactile feedback instead of the complex ZMP calculations. We employ the minimum number of sensing elements with a specialized layout to the soles of robotic feet to enable the robot to walk on different uneven grounds. The effectiveness of the proposed method was confirmed by walking experiments with a 17 degree-of-freedoms, DOFs humanoid robot platform. The experiments show that the robot can perform balanced walking on the upward and downward slopes. In these experiments, information about ground floor or robot orientation is not required in advance.