Performing acrobatic maneuvers like dynamic jumping in bipedal robots presents significant challenges in terms of actuation, motion planning, and control. Traditional approaches to these tasks often simplify dynamics to enhance computational efficiency, potentially overlooking critical factors such as the control of centroidal angular momentum (CAM) and the variability of centroidal composite rigid body inertia (CCRBI). This letter introduces a novel integrated dynamic planning and control framework, termed centroidal dynamics model-based model predictive control (CDM-MPC), designed for robust jumping control that fully considers centroidal momentum and non-constant CCRBI. The framework comprises an optimization-based kinodynamic motion planner and an MPC controller for real-time trajectory tracking and replanning. Additionally, a centroidal momentum-based inverse kinematics (IK) solver and a landing heuristic controller are developed to ensure stability during high-impact landings. The efficacy of the CDM-MPC framework is validated through extensive testing on the full-sized humanoid robot KUAVO in both simulations and experiments.

Reinforcement learning provides a general framework for achieving autonomy and diversity in traditional robot motion control. Robots must walk dynamically to adapt to different ground environments in complex environments. To achieve walking ability similar to that of humans, robots must be able to perceive, understand and interact with the surrounding environment. In 3D environments, walking like humans on rugged terrain is a challenging task because it requires complex world model generation, motion planning and control algorithms and their integration. So, the learning of high-dimensional complex motions is still a hot topic in research. This paper proposes a deep reinforcement learning-based footstep tracking method, which tracks the robot’s footstep position by adding periodic and symmetrical information of bipedal walking to the reward function. The robot can achieve robot obstacle avoidance and omnidirectional walking, turning, standing and climbing stairs in complex environments. Experimental results show that reinforcement learning can be combined with real-time robot footstep planning, avoiding the learning of path-planning information in the model training process, so as to avoid the model learning unnecessary knowledge and thereby accelerate the training process.

To achieve robot motion imitating, it is important to ensure morphological similarity, physical feasibility, and generalization of actions between robots and motion capture datasets. Traditional motion controllers require designing controllers for each motion type, which can be time-consuming to adjust controller parameters. However, reinforcement learning algorithms are increasingly used in robot motion control, enabling robots or physical simulation characters to learn skills such as maintaining balance or completing specific tasks. This paper presents a system for action learning imitation, allowing robots to imitate flexible graph-powered motion matching datasets. By incorporating domain randomization methods during training, the model can maintain robustness even when the environment or model is in error, enabling the action model obtained in simulation to be deployed to the real robot. To experimentally verify the proposed method, the paper designs a simulation environment for a 20 degree-of-freedom multi-joint bipedal robot and deploys the trained robot behavior model on the roban robot for imitation action learning and responsive dynamic walking.

Uneven terrain walking is hard to achieve for most child-size humanoid robots, as they are unable to accurately detect ground conditions. In order to reduce the demand for ground detection accuracy, a walking control framework based on centroidal momentum allocation is studied in this paper, enabling a child-size humanoid robot to walk on uneven terrain without using ground flatness information. The control framework consists of three controllers: momentum decreasing controller, posture controller, admittance controller. First, the momentum decreasing controller is used to quickly stabilize the robot after disturbance. Then, the posture controller restores the robot posture to adapt to the unknown terrain. Finally, the admittance controller aims to decrease contact impact and adapt the robot to the terrain. Note that the robot uses a mems-based inertial measurement unit (IMU) and joint position encoders to calculate centroidal momentum and use force-sensitive resistors (FSR) on the robot foot to perform admittance control. None of these is a high-cost component. Experiments are conducted to test the proposed framework, including standing posture balancing, structured non-flat ground walking, and soft uneven terrain walking, with a speed of 2.8 s per step, showing the effectiveness of the momentum allocation method.