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Boston Dynamics' 'Atlas' Robot Walks Naturally with Straighter Legs

With a control algorithm by IHMC Robotics  , the Atlas robot from Boston Dynamics demonstrates a more natural gait with straighter legs. Instead of controlling the height directly, Atlas tries to maintain its legs as straight as possible while walking. The work is published in the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation  .

Topics:
Automation Motion Control Robotics Software

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    Transcript

    00:00:05 humanoid robots often walk with highly bent knees while this has some control advantages it results in unnatural and inefficient gates this is typically done by tracking some center of mass height trajectory requiring complicated and often time-consuming height planning instead we leave the height uncontrolled resulting in a non-empty task null space in our whole body controller this means

    00:00:28 any height solution becomes valid we select the one that results in the legs being as straight as possible by commanding straightening joint accelerations to the knees in this null space using this approach and just commanding the legs to be straight the robot can then balance and recover from external disturbances while standing for control during walking we use a state

    00:00:52 machine to determine the desired joint angles for the leg this includes collapsing at the end of the support phase bending during swing and straightening when approaching heel strike in order to feasibly walk with straight legs though the robot must be able to tow off while walking to do so we define criteria for when to toe off based on the proximity the instantaneous

    00:01:13 capture point to the leaving foot and the location of the reaction forces when towing off the robot moves the foot contact points to the middle of the toe edge the foot pitch motion is left unconstrained allowing the toe of motion to emerge naturally from the whole body controller null space when necessary using this approach the robot is able to quickly walk with straight legs this

    00:01:40 approach also works for when performing step adjustment the robot can also go over rough terrain using this approach including large step downs