Amisha Bhaskar1 Swati Dantu2 Spandan Roy2 Jinoh Lee3 Simone Baldi4
1 Netaji Subhas University of Technology, New Delhi 2 IIIT Hyderabad, India 3 Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany 4 School of CyberScience and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China
Long standing challenges in adaptive bipedal walking control (i.e. control taking care of unknown robot parameters) were to unify the control design instead of designing multiple controllers for different walking phases as well as to bypass computing constraint forces, since it often leads to complex designs. A few attempts to design a single controller for all walking phases ignored or oversimplified the constraint forces. However, these forces are state-dependent and may lead to conservative performance or instability if not countered properly. This work proposes an innovative adaptive control method, based on artificial time delay control, which covers the entire bipedal walking phase and provides robustness against state-dependent unmodelled dynamics such as constraint forces and external impulsive forces arising during walking. Studies using a high fidelity simulator under various forms of disturbances show the effectiveness of the proposed design over the state of the art.