Session 7: Locomotion

Abstract

Legs are one of the most prominent parts that characterize animals as well as robots. This session includes five papers on locomotion by legs. The first two papers are on humanoid robots. They are focused on planning some advanced motions such as passing under an obstacle and standing up from a chair which is located close to a table. The other three papers are on small animals and insects which have four or six legs. They are all focused on improving the locomotion performance from the viewpoint of mechanism and motion planning.

The first paper, “Passing Under Obstacles with Humanoid Robot” by Sanada, Yoshida, and Yokoi presents a motion planning method for humaniod robots to pass under obstacles, such as a bar, by using a “sideway passing under motion.” The proposed motion planner finds a goal configuration and connects it with the initial configuration by a collision-free dynamically stable motion. The validity of the proposed method was shown by experiments with humanoid robot HRP-2. A future research direction will be to improve the method to make the obtained motion look more natural.