Human-Like Gait Adaptation to Slippery Surfaces for the NAO Robot Wearing Instrumented Shoes

Abstract

Gait development for bipedal/humanoid robots has been a field of study with a lot of attention for several years and is becoming increasingly important as robots slowly become part of our daily lives. Therefore, it is expectable that robots should adopt human-like behaviors in order to make their interactions with humans more natural and studies have been made involving robots that have a natural, human-like gait. However, very few focus on scenarios with slippery floors. In this paper, the humanoid robot NAO is used and the effects of a human-based walking pattern on the robot’s balance when walking on floors with different slipperiness degrees were analyzed. The simulations are done having the robot equipped with specially developed shoes that enable the measurement of the friction coefficient. From that analysis, an algorithm that automatically adapts the gait parameters to the floor’s slipperiness was developed, in order to prevent the robot from suffering unexpected disturbances and possibly falling over. This paper focusses on preventing balance disturbances, instead of correcting them.