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Published December 21, 2022 | Submitted
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Robust Bipedal Locomotion: Leveraging Saltation Matrices for Gait Optimization

Abstract

The ability to generate robust walking gaits on bipedal robots is key to their successful realization on hardware. To this end, this work extends the method of Hybrid Zero Dynamics (HZD) -- which traditionally only accounts for locomotive stability via periodicity constraints under perfect impact events -- through the inclusion of the saltation matrix with a view toward synthesizing robust walking gaits. By jointly minimizing the norm of the extended saltation matrix and the torque of the robot directly in the gait generation process, we demonstrate that the synthesized gaits are more robust than gaits generated with either term alone; these results are shown in simulation and on hardware for the AMBER-3M planar biped and the Atalante lower-body exoskeleton (both with and without a human subject). The end result is experimental validation that combining saltation matrices with HZD methods produces more robust bipedal walking in practice.

Additional Information

This research was supported by NSF Graduate Research Fellowship No. DGE-1745301 and the Zeitlin Family Fund. Research involving human subjects was conducted under IRB No. 21-0693. The authors would like to thank Kejun (Amy) Li for assisting with the exoskeleton experiments, as well as the Wandercraft team for their continued guidance and technical support with Atalante.

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Created:
August 20, 2023
Modified:
October 24, 2023