Motion Planning for Omnidirectional Dynamic Gait in Humanoid Soccer Robots

This paper deals with the problem of planning the Center of Mass (CoM) trajectory of a humanoid robot while its feet follow an omnidirectional walking pattern. This trajectory should satisfy the dynamic stability criterion to ensure analytically that the Zero Moment Point (ZMP) lies within the support polygon. The proposed approach provides flexibility and agility to humanoid robots, which is of special interest in highly dynamic environments, such as soccer robotics. The experimental results show that the proposed method permits on-line calculation of omnidirectional stable trajectories in the commercial humanoid platform NAO, which has limited computational resources.