Mechanical Design of a Biped Robot FORREST and an Extended Capture-Point-Based Walking Pattern Generator

In recent years, many studies have shown that soft robots with elastic actuators enable robust interaction with the environment. Compliant joints can protect mechanical systems and provide better dynamic performance, thus offering huge potential for further developments of humanoid robots. This paper proposes a new biped robot. The new robot combines a torque sensor-based active elastic hip and a spring-based passive elastic knee/ankle. In the first part, the mechanical design is introduced, and in the second part, the kinematics and dynamics capabilities are described. Furthermore, we introduce a new extended capture-point-based walking pattern generator that calculates footstep positions, which are used as input for the controller of our new biped robot. The main contribution of this article is the novel mechanical design and an extended walking pattern generator. The new design offers a unique solution for cable-driven bipeds to achieve both balancing and walking. Meanwhile, the new walking pattern generator can generate smooth desired curves, which is an improvement over traditional generators that use a constant zero-moment-point (ZMP). A simple cartesian controller is applied to test the performance of the walking pattern generator. Although the robot has been built, all experiments regarding the pattern generator are still simulated using MATLAB/Simulink. The focus of this work is to analyze the mechanical design and show the capabilities of the robot by applying a new pattern generator.