New Cross-Step Enabled Configurations for Humanoid Robot

This paper explores two new configurations for humanoid robot balancing and locomotion. Centroidal momentum manipulability analysis has been performed to study the features of the newly proposed configurations. Numerical simulations show that they outperform the regular ones in terms of angular momentum manipulability. More than that, the new configurations allow the humanoid robot to perform cross-step motions which is usually risky or mechanically impossible for most existing robots. However, cross-step introduces non-convex feasible region which makes it difficult to be incorporated into our existing step planner. Therefore, a simple heuristic has been proposed to help choosing a sub-convex region for the step planner. To validate the cross-step movement, walking simulations have been performed.