Observing the state of balance with a single upper-body sensor

The occurrence of falls is an urgent challenge in our aging society. For wearable devices that actively prevent falls or mitigate their consequences, a critical prerequisite is knowledge on the user’s current state of balance. To keep such wearable systems practical and to achieve high acceptance, only very limited sensor instrumentation is...

Center of mass velocity-based predictions in balance recovery following pelvis perturbations during human walking

In many simple walking models, foot placement dictates the center of pressure location and ground reaction force components, whereas humans can modulate these aspects after foot contact. Because of the differences, it is unclear to what extent predictions made by models are valid for human walking. Yet, both model simulations and human...

Touchdown control in bipedal robot walking

Currently a lot of research is performed in the field of walking robots and especially on bipedal humanoid robots. Successful walking robots have been made but there are still problems that have to be overcome to make them as versatile, robust and energy efficient as human beings. One of these problems is the control of balance after taking a...

Step location prediction for bipedal robots: Evaluating and improving Capture Point theory

There are many good reason for the development of a robust bipedal walking robot. However, until recently this development was hampered by the lack of a disturbance rejecting locomotion algorithms. With the introduction of Capture Point theory by Pratt et al. [2006] this problem has been largely solved. Capture Point theory describes the point...

Balance maintenance of a humanoid robot using the hip-ankle strategy

Prevention of falling is of major importance in the practical application of humanoid robots. This thesis focuses on the hip-ankle strategy as a method to maintain balance when subjected to a large disturbance. This strategy is characterised by a large rotation of the hip joint which repositions the Centre of Mass (CoM). The hip-ankle strategy...

Foot placement in robotic bipedal locomotion

Human walking is remarkably robust, versatile and energy-efficient: humans have the ability to handle large unexpected disturbances, perform a wide variety of gaits and consume little energy. A bipedal walking robot that performs well on all of these aspects has not yet been developed. Some robots are versatile, others are energy-efficient, and...