Control of Humanoid Hopping Based on a SLIP Model

Humanoid robots are poised to play an ever-increasing role in society over the coming decades. The structural similarity of these robots to humans makes them natural candidates for applications such as elder care or search and rescue in spaces designed for human occupancy. These robots currently, however, do not have the capability for fast dynamic movements which may be required to quickly recover balance or to traverse challenging terrains. Control of a basic dynamic movement, hopping, is studied here through simulation experiments on a 26 degree of freedom humanoid model. Center of mass trajectories are planned with a spring-loaded inverted pendulum (SLIP) model and are tracked with a task-space controller. Unauthored arm movements emerge from the task-space approach to produce continuous dynamic hopping at 1.5 m/s.