Design and Implementation of Voltage Based Human Inspired Feedback Control of a Planar Bipedal Robot AMBER

Abstract

This thesis presents an approach towards experimental realization of underactuated bipedal robotic walking using human data. Human-inspired control theory serves as the foundation for this work. As the name, "human-inspired control," suggests, by using human walking data, certain outputs (termed human outputs) are found which can be represented by simple functions of time (termed canonical walking functions). Then, an optimization problem is used to determine the best fit of the canonical walking function to the human data, which guarantees a physically realizable walking for a specific bipedal robot. The main focus of this work is to construct a control scheme which takes the optimization results as input and delivers human-like walking on the real-world robotic platform - AMBER. To implement the human-inspired control techniques experimentally on a physical bipedal robot AMBER, a simple voltage based control law is presented which utilizes only the human outputs and canonical walking function with parameters obtained from the optimization. Since this controller does not require model inversion, it can be implemented efficiently in software. Moreover, applying this methodology to AMBER, experimentally results in robust and efficient "human-like" robotic walking.