A framework for learning biped locomotion with dynamical movement primitives

This article summarizes our framework for learning biped locomotion using dynamical movement primitives based on nonlinear oscillators. Our ultimate goal is to establish a design principle of a controller in order to achieve natural humanlike locomotion. We suggest dynamical movement primitives as a central pattern generator (CPG) of a biped robot, an approach we have previously proposed for learning and encoding complex human movements. Demonstrated trajectories are learned through movement primitives by locally weighted regression, and the frequency of the learned trajectories is adjusted automatically by a frequency adaptation algorithm based on phase resetting and entrainment of coupled oscillators. Numerical simulations and experimental implementation on a physical robot demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed locomotion controller. Furthermore, we demonstrate that phase resetting contributes to robustness against external perturbations and environmental changes by numerical simulations and experiments.