Walking Gait Control: From Bipeds to Quadrupeds

15^th July 2025, 13:00
Ahmed Chemori
LIRMM, University of Montpellier, CNRS

Abstract

Walking gait control is one of the most important research problems in humanoid and legged robotics.
The first part of the talk will be devoted to walking gait control, where this problem is resolved through a human-data-based control architecture for pattern generation and dynamic walking control. The proposed method in this case deals with whole-body control, where a motion capture system is used to acquire the necessary data to reproduce human-like motions on a humanoid robot. However, unlike most of the existing techniques, where a large amount of data is used, only feet and CoM positions are needed to describe the most relevant features of a human walking. The redundancy in the humanoid model is then considered to track these two objectives using task formalism. The proposed solution is validated through numerical simulations and real-time experiments on the humanoid robot HOAP3 for various motion scenarios.
The second part of the talk addresses the problem of walking gait control for quadruped robots on soft, wet grounds, such as mud, sand, or forest soils. The proposed solution is based on a controller designed with several versions with increasing complexity that use a combination of a creeping gait, a foot–substrate interaction detection, a model-based center of mass positioning, and a leg speed monitoring, along with their experimental validation in a tank filled with mud, and demonstrations in natural environments. All the implemented controllers are tested on the Go1 quadruped robot and also compared in terms of performance with the commercially available dynamic gait controller of Go1.

Biography

Ahmed Chemori received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees, both in automatic control, from the Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble, France, in 2001 and 2005 respectively. During the year 2004/2005 he was a Research and Teaching assistant at Laboratoire de Signaux et Systèmes (LSS - Centrale Supelec) and the University Paris 11. Then he joined Gipsa-Lab (Former LAG) as a CNRS postdoctoral researcher. He is currently a senior CNRS researcher in Automatic Control and Robotics for the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), at the Montpellier Laboratory of Computer Science, Robotics and Microelectronics (LIRMM). His research interests include nonlinear (adaptive, robust, and predictive) control and their real-time applications in different fields of robotics (underactuated robotics, parallel robotics, underwater robotics, humanoid robotics, and wearable robotics). He is the author of more than 185 scientific publications, including international journals, patents, books, book chapters, and international conferences. He co-supervised 26 PhD theses (including 21 defended) and more than 35 MSc theses.
He is currently an IEEE Senior Member and Technical Editor of the Journal "IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics", associate editor for the journal “Frontiers in Robotics and AI”, and guest editor for several special issues. He is a member of the IFAC Technical Committee on Adaptive and Learning Systems (TC 1.2), the IFAC Technical Committee on Mechatronic Systems (TC 4.2), the IFAC Technical Committee on Robotics (TC 4.3), and the IFAC Technical Committee on Marine Systems (TC 7.2). He served as a TPC/IPC member or associate editor for several international conferences, and he organized different scientific events.