See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/340894660

Walking Algorithm for Robotis Op3 Humanoid Robot with Force Sensors

Conference Paper · October 2019

DOI: 10.1109/DeSE.2019.00014

CITATION READS
1 128

3 authors, including:

Artur Sagitov Liliya Radikovna Gavrilova

Kazan (Volga Region) Federal University Kazan (Volga Region) Federal University
36 PUBLICATIONS   177 CITATIONS    6 PUBLICATIONS   4 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Research and Development of Software Solutions for Static and Dynamic Based Control of Anthropomorphic Bipedal Robots Locomotion View project

Autonomous calibration of onboard robot cameras using fiducial markers View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Liliya Radikovna Gavrilova on 17 June 2021.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 2019 Developments in eSystems Engineering (DeSE)

Walking algorithm for ROBOTIS OP3 humanoid

robot with force sensors
Georgy Vasilyev
Intelligent Robotics Department
ITIS, Kazan Federal University
Kazan, Russian Federation
vasilyev.georgy@gmail.com
Artur Sagitov
Intelligent Robotics Department
ITIS, Kazan Federal University
Kazan, Russian Federation
sagitov@it.kfu.ru
Liliya Gavrilova
Intelligent Robotics Department
ITIS, Kazan Federal University
Kazan, Russian Federation
gavrilova@it.kfu.ru

Kuo-Lan Su Tatyana Tsoy

Department of Electrical Engineering, Intelligent Robotics Department
National Yunlin University of Science ITIS, Kazan Federal University
and Technology, Taiwan Kazan, Russian Federation
sukl@yuntech.edu.tw tt@it.kfu.ru

Abstract—This paper presents the implementation of

walking algorithm for small-size humanoid robot ROBOTIS
OP3 and its assessment by using force sensitive resistors (FSR).
The goal of this work is to provide a simple walking controller
based on quasistatic stability and assessment of its performance
accuracy with the use of FSR. For this purpose, the robot has
been retrofitted with ROBOTIS OP2 FSR kit. The servos errors
are compared with the center of mass (CoM) position estimated
from installed FSR with positioning error analysis.
Keywords—robotis op3, force sensing resistor, locomotion,
gait
I. INTRODUCTION
One of the primary problems of modern robotics is the task
of developing and creating robots, the advantages of which
would be increased maneuverability, the ability to perform
various works in an environment created and adapted directly
for human. In addition, this robot should be capable of
working in difficult and dangerous for human conditions such
as nuclear, chemically or biologically polluted areas. From
this point of view, it would be fair to say that a humanoid is
the most relevant platforms for research in this field of
robotics.
Currently, various competitions are held, such as
RobotSoccer World Cup, DARPA Robotics Challenge and
others, the purpose of which is to attract interest for the
development and research in the field of humanoid robotics.
As the result the plenty of challenging researches on walking
[1], motion planning [2], manipulating, vision processing [3]
and artificial intelligence [4] have been conducted and so
considerable results have been demonstrated.
I. HUMANOID LOCOMOTION
Considering the biped walking note that there are various
methods to ensure the balance of the robot [5, 6]. One of the
most popular concepts in online gait generation is based on the
simplified robot model such as Linear Inverted Pendulum
Mode (LIPM) [7], which is used for Virtual Height Inverted
Pendulum Mode (VHIPM) [8]. For position controlled robots
the Zero Moment Point (ZMP) [9], introduced by
Vukobratovic in late 1960’s, is still important criterion, so that
ZMP based LIPM is typically used in walking motion
planning to reduce the computational time in comparison with
full-dynamics model.
Kajita et al. proposed the use of widely-known preview
control method in the task of biped walking patterns
generation [10]. Relatively recently other criteria for dynamic
stability were put forward. The Contact Wrench Cone (CWC)
criterion assumes robot will keep dynamic balance if the sum
of the gravity and the inertia wrench applied to the zCOG of it
is inside the polyhedral convex cone of the contact wrench
between robot feet and its environment [11].
Another one is the Capture Point (Pratt et al.) is the point
on the ground where the robot has to place the ZMP to come
to a complete rest (kinetic energy of the robot is zero and will
remain zero with proper torques values on joints) [12].The
ability to extend and modify the robot system can be useful,
and sometimes necessary for research in the field of humanoid
robots.
At the moment, there are not so many platforms allow one
to freely expand their functionality by adding new devices to
the robot system. As example of such robots can be DARwIn-
OP a humanoid developed and produced by Korean robot
manufacturer Robotis in cooperation with the Robotics and
mechanics Laboratory (RoMeLa) at Virginia Tech [13]. Thus,
DARWIN OP and OP2 are regular participants in RoboCup
challenges. The latest model of ROBOTIS (aka DARWIN
OP) is ROBOTIS OP3 platform. In this paper we overview
quasi-static walking pattern generation controller and its
performance accuracy assessment with FSR set which are
applied for ROBOTIS OP3 anthropomorphic robot. The
experiments and control algorithms evaluation for ROBOTIS
OP3 are performed with the real robot.
The rest of this paper is organized as following. Section 2
describes characteristics of ROBOTIS OP3 humanoid robot
(and FSR kit). Section 3 presents biped robot balance method,
which are used in our research, and FSR implementation.
Section 4 show experiment result with hardware. In section 5
we give conclusions and discuss future work.

978-1-7281-3021-7/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE 20

DOI 10.1109/DeSE.2019.00014
 II. PLATFORM DESCRIPTION
A. Robotis OP3
The controller was implemented on ROBOTIS OP3
developed and produced by the Korean robot manufacturer
Robotis.OP3 stands for Open Platform Humanoid Project that
means open source software system based on Linux Ubuntu
16.04LTS and ready access to hardware component. Thus, one
has free physical access to the robot sensors, as well as the
possibility of its modification, i.e. improvement and complete
replacement of any component.
ROBOTIS OP3 is twenty degrees of freedom (DoF) biped
with twenty XM430-W350actuators. XM430 is a single axis
of rotation servo, having a 12-bit encoder with precision of
0.088°. Each leg has six DoF, namely, three DoF in hip, one
DOF in the knee and two DoF in ankle. ROBOTIS OP3 fully
supports Robot Operating System (ROS). ROS is an open
source software framework, using by developer community
for research and development purposes. Relevant robot
specifications are given in Table 1.

Fig.2. Foot FSR locations

B. Force-Sensing Resistors
To estimate the actual CoM position in ground plane the
FSR kit for DARwIn-OP2 was used. However, in order to
utilize the sensors, it was necessary to connect them to the
robot physically. Since the XM430-W350-R servo interface
(RS485,4 pin) is different from the FSR interface (TTL, 3 pin),
it is not possible to connect the FSR using daisy chain.
Locations of FSR sensors in a foot are presented in Figure
2.
Fig.1. Robotis OP3 robot

TABLE I. ROBOTIS OP3 SPECIFICATIONS

Parameter Value
Height 510mm

Weight cover) D About 3.5kg (without skin

DoF 20
Linux (64-bit), C++, ROS, Dynamixel
Operating System
SDK
Actuators XM430-W350-R
INTEL NUC i3 Intel Core i3 processor
Main Controller dual core8GB RAM DDR4 SODIMMs
2133MHz 128GB M.2 SSD Fig.3. OP3 foot with FSR sensors
Sub Controller OpenCR An alternative route is to use a full independent sub-
IMU Sensor
3-Axis Gyroscope3-Axis Accelerometer3- controller such as Arduino Uno. Through experimentation
Axis Magnetometer with various possible solutions, we propose the use of
ROBOTIS OpenCM 9.04, which already has four TTL ports
for use with Dynamixel’s sensors and motors.

21
 Where T is a step period, L is step length, y0 is a distance
between foot and Y-axis, H is a feet ground clearance height.
The CoM trajectory was calculated as:

Where (x0; y0) and (x1; y1) are coordinates of geometric centers
of the feet, TCoM is the CoM translation period, z0 is the CoM
height.
Fig.4. OpenCM 9.04 (from Robotis website) Finally, the joint angles could be obtained as solution of
inverse kinematics (IK) task for legs kinematics chains.
A significant disadvantage of this approach is the lack of
III. QUASI-STATIC WALKING CONTROLLER
robot body position evaluation relative with respect to world
Static walking criterion assumes that the robot is statically frame. To eliminate this, the CoM current position obtained by
stable, that means if at any time robot stops all motion it will means of the FSR are used.
keep in a stable position indefinitely. To realize it, the
projection of the CoM on the ground needs to stay always For its implementation on a robot, we used functionality of
inside the foot support area. ROS and ROBOTIS Framework. In order to obtain kinematic
solutions the solvers from Kinematics and Dynamics Library
In the case of one supporting leg the support area is stance (KDL), distributed by the Orocos Project, were utilized.
foot surface or the convex hull of both feet in case of double
support phase. Taking into account specificity of bipedal
walking such as single support phase, when the body weight
is on the current stance leg, there could be moments when
CoM leave support area if a contact surface of the foot is small.
Therefore, because of this the bipedal stability can be
considered as quasi-static.
In quasi-static walking it is important, that walking speed
should be low in order to inertial forces are negligible. This
type of locomotion requires feet with large support area and
can provide only slow walking speeds.
The quasi-static controller generates walking pattern
according predefined step parameters such as step period,
length, the ground clearance between foot and the ground and
initial swing leg.
The distinctive property of the two-legged robot walking
is a presence of certain phases such as single-and double
support phases. As a period of repetition in the process can be
considered one step.
For our trajectory generation we have made following
assumptions:
x The robot body is held upright, i.e. parallel to the
ground
x The swing leg’s foot is parallel to the ground
x CoM of the robot is moving at fixed height
x Swing foot is translated according to the cycloid
trajectory to minimize the ground hit force:
Fig. 5. Kinematic diagram for ROBOTIS OP3 legs

To evaluate the proposed walking controller, we performed

the hardware experiments that were conducted using several
ROBOTIS OP3 robots. The center of pressure for a foot was
calculated according to relative distance average location of
the individual FSR sensors on the foot.

22

Fig. 6. Controller system diagram
IV. CONCLUSIONS
At the current phase of our research, we have modelled
statically stable ROBOTIS OP3 humanoid locomotion. The
hardware experiments were conducted on OP3 robot.
The main weakness of the algorithm is the lack of a
feedback, which leads to errors accumulation with time that
significantly limits its application. The use of FSR could
eliminate this disadvantage, but the robot cannot reach high
walking speed because of selected robot stability criterion.
Thereby, maximal walking speed with quasi-static gait is
lower than in case of dynamic walking. Hence, as a part of our
future work we are considering the implementation of ZMP
based LIPM dynamic walking.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The reported study was funded by the Russian Foundation
for Basic Research (RFBR) according to the research project
No. 19-58-70002.
REFERENCES
[1] M. Krause, J. Englsberger, P.-B. Wieber, and C. Ott, “Stabilization of
the capture point dynamics for bipedal walking based on model predictive
control,” IFAC Proceedings Volumes, vol. 45, no. 22, pp. 165–171, 2012.
[2] R. Khusainov, A. Sagitov, A. Klimchik, and E. Magid, “Arbitrary
trajectory foot planner for bipedal walking.” in ICINCO (2), 2017, pp. 417–
424.
23
View publication stats
[3] B. Gabbasov, I. Danilov, I. Afanasyev, E. Magid, Toward a human-
like biped robot gait: Biomechanical analysis of human locomotion recorded
by Kinect-based Motion Capture system //2015 10th International
Symposium on Mechatronics and its Applications (ISMA). – IEEE, 2015. –
pp. 1-6.
[4] M. Brandao, Y. M. Shiguematsu, K. Hashimoto, and A. Takanishi,
“Material recognition cnns and hierarchical planning for biped robot
locomotion on slippery terrain,” in 2016 IEEE-RAS 16th International
Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids). IEEE, 2016, pp. 81–88.
[5] E. Magid, T. Tsubouchi, E. Koyanagi, T. Yoshida. Static balance for
rescue robot navigation: Losing balance on purpose within random step
environment. In 2010 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent
Robots and Systems – IEEE, 2010. – pp. 349-356.
[6] E. Magid, T. Tsubouchi. (2010). Static Balance for Rescue Robot
Navigation-Translation Motion Discretization Issue within Random Step
Environment. In ICINCO (2) – 2010. – pp. 415-422.
[7] S. Kajita, F. Kanehiro, K. Kaneko, K. Yokoi, and H. Hirukawa, “The
3d linear inverted pendulum mode: A simple modeling for a biped walking
pattern generation,” in Proceedings 2001 IEEE/RSJ International Conference
on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Expanding the Societal Role of Robotics
in the the Next Millennium (Cat. No. 01CH37180), vol. 1.
IEEE, 2001, pp. 239–246.
[8] R. Khusainov, A. Sagitov, A. Klimchik, and E. Magid, “Modelling of
dynamically stable ar-601m robot locomotion in simulink,” in MATEC Web
of Conferences, vol. 75. EDP Sciences, 2016, p. 09004.
[9] M. Vukobratovic and B. Borovac, “Zero-moment pointthirty five
years´ of its life,” International journal of humanoid robotics, vol. 1, no. 01,
pp. 157–173, 2004.
[10] S. Kajita, F. Kanehiro, K. Kaneko, K. Fujiwara, K. Harada, K. Yokoi,
and H. Hirukawa, “Biped walking pattern generation by using preview
control of zero-moment point,” in 2003 IEEE International Conference on
Robotics and Automation (Cat. No. 03CH37422), vol. 2. IEEE, 2003, pp.
1620–1626.
[11] H. Hirukawa, S. Hattori, K. Harada, S. Kajita, K. Kaneko, F.
Kanehiro, K. Fujiwara, and M. Morisawa, “A universal stability criterion of
the foot contact of legged robots-adios zmp,” in Proceedings 2006 IEEE
International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2006. ICRA 2006.
IEEE, 2006, pp. 1976–1983.
[12] J. Pratt, J. Carff, S. Drakunov, and A. Goswami, “Capture point: A
step toward humanoid push recovery,” in 2006 6th IEEE-RAS international
conference on humanoid robots. IEEE, 2006, pp. 200–207.
[13] I. Ha, Y. Tamura, H. Asama, J. Han, and D. W. Hong, “Development
of open humanoid platform darwin-op,” in SICE annual conference 2011.