Motion planning for underactuated bipedal mechanisms with kinematic constraints

Abstract

The motion planning for a bipedal robotic gait is studied in this paper in the light of its underactuated nature. The generation of motion trajectory and the corresponding actuation command for an underactuated mechanism is a challenging problem, especially when it is required to needs to satisfy a set of equalities forming kinematics constraints. Existing method that utilises forward dynamics approach is computationally expensive since the equation of motion, given the actuation command, needs to be integrated with respect to time prior to obtain the resulting motion before it can be tested against the kinematic constraints. In this paper, the use of virtual actuators on the unactuated join..