Control and experiments of a multi-purpose bipedal locomotor with parallel mechanism

This paper describes a control and a structure of a battery driven bipedal robot, WL-15(Waseda Leg-15), which has a 6-DOF parallel mechanism. WL-15 has been designed as a multi-purpose locomotion of robotic systems. This robot is controlled by the QNX real-time operating system. Using Math Works´ SIMULINK and OPAL-RT´s RT-LAB executed on Windows NT and QNX target systems, control software and pattern generator are developed. A walking control capable of dealing with various dynamic walking is proposed and tested indoors and outdoors using the WL-15. Dynamic biped walking is realized with the maximum step length of 200 mm, the maximum walking speed of 0.8 s/step and the minimum speed of 1.92 s/step. Also, the WL-15 is confirmed to be able to turn 90 deg in two steps and carry a load of 18 kg.