Design and Construction of “ArtRo” Omnidirectional Walking Bipedal Robot using Hierarchical Reactive Behaviors Control Architecture

Bipedal robot locomotion has been a complicated and challenging matter over the time. This paper describes our work on building omnidirectional walking bipedal robot, included mechanical and electrical design aspect, and its behavior control as well. We adopted a technique introduced by Sven Behnke that enables omnidirectional walking on bipedal robot through the use hierarchical reactive behaviors control architecture. We called the robot “ArtRo”. Currently, ArtRo has successfully implemented a body consisting of two legs, lower abdomen, and a dummy weight representing the upper body load, with a total of 12 degrees-of-freedom (DOF). The mechanical system is designed optimally to facilitate the manufacturing process and the computation of robot parameters. The electrical system of ArtRo consists of main controller and actuator system. The main controller is an Atmel’s ATmega128-based microcontroller system. The actuator system implements a special method involving Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) to control all ArtRo’s servo motors. The Sven Behnke’s technique has a low computational complexity. It is proven by its successful implementation on ArtRo’s main controller. Adaptation of the technique has been successfully implemented, ArtRo is capable to do omnidirectional walking, whether it is forward walking, side walking, or turning on the spot behavior.