Benchmarking the biped locomotion

Science
1

Along my PhD thesis, one of the main difficult I faced was the evaluation of the biped locomotion. How can we give a mark to a motion as complex as the biped locomotion involving at the same time the hardware design, the whole body control and dynamics ?

In science we like to explore each parameters one by one and be ensured that they are independent. Concerning the walking, it is not the case raising challenge to evaluate and compare performance both for mechanics design and the control.

I suggest we use this topic to reference interesting work trying to address these challenges.

2

At the Humanoids2013 conference, there was a workshop about this topic. This workshop called “Benchmarking of human-like robotic locomotion” was organized by the H2R project:

The goal of H2R project is to demonstrate human-like gait and posture in a controlled compliant biped robot as a result of a combination of the most relevant motor control and cognitive mechanisms found in humans.
In order to achieve this goal, we will adopt a threefold process:

  1. Understanding the key biological principles from human experiments.
  2. Translating the formalized concepts into human-like bipedal robots.
  3. Creating new benchmarking schemes for validating the robotic performance.

And the current actors in the consortium are:

  1. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones (Spain)
  2. University of Kaiserslautern (Germany)
  3. Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium)
  4. University Medical school Göttingen (Germany)
  5. Universitaetsklinikum Freiburg (Germany)
  6. Technaid S.L. (Spain)

Interesting project and we can notice some of these actors already contacted us to get more information or use Poppy.

3

Very interested by this topic. I think benchmarking of the gait shall be based on measurable tests for the following subjects : stability, efficiency, degree of freedom and diversity. for each subject, simple tests can be done.
-for instance, a way to measure stability is to count the number of steps without falling, the maximal step size the robot can handle without falling.
-for efficiency, the distance run with one battery charged
-for degree of freedom, the need for external lateral stabilisation.
-for diversity, how many walking shape can be reached (sad, happy, lazy …)

but the most important is stability for me.
i do not know if we can quantify others index about human like shape.

I was told about this forum at innorobo, it seems nice. i wish i will have enough time to participate in this project.