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Slipping and Tripping Reflexes for Bipedal Robots

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Abstract

Many robot applications require legged robots to traverse rough orunmodeled terrain. This paper explores strategies that would enablelegged robots to respond to two common types of surface contacterror: slipping and tripping. Because of the rapid response requiredand the difficulty of sensing uneven terrain, we propose a set ofreflexes that would permit the robot to react without modeling oranalyzing the error condition in detail. These reflexive responsesallow robust recovery from a variety of contact errors. We presentsimulation trials for single-slip tasks with varying coefficients offriction and single-trip tasks with varying obstacle heights.

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Boone, G.N., Hodgins, J.K. Slipping and Tripping Reflexes for Bipedal Robots. Autonomous Robots 4, 259–271 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008891909459

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008891909459

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