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In this paper, dynamic stair climbing and descending are experimentally realized for a biped humanoid robot, HUBO. Currently, in addition to biped walking on the ground, other types of biped walking such as running, jogging, and stair walking (climbing and descending) have been also studied since the end of 1990. In spite of many years of research works on stair walking, it is still a challengeable topic that requires high performance of control technique. For dynamic stair walking, we designed stair climbing and descending patterns according to a known stair configuration. Next, we defined stair climbing and descending stages for a switching control strategy. In each stage, we designed and adopted several online controllers to maintain the balance. For the simplicity and easy application, the online controllers only use the force and torque signals of the force/torque sensors of the feet. Finally, the effectiveness and performance of the proposed strategy are verified through stair climbing and descending experiments of HUBO.

Modern walking robots are able to negotiate rough terrain. However there are still open topics, especially when there is a need to climb or descend an obstacle. This article presents the perception system for descending stairs with the sixlegged walking robot. The perception system for stair descent differs much from that used for stair climbing, while during the descent most of the surfaces of the step suffer from occlusions. Author describes the solution to this problem. The perception system consists of two sensors. Namely a video camera and a force sensor at the tip of the leg for active haptic sensing. The monocular vision system gives the scale of the stairs and the active haptic sensing system provides the additional information to obtain the real geometry of the obstacle. In the presented paper experiments were performed on the walking robot Messor. The article describes the monocular vision system and the method for obtaining the geometry of stairs. Next the ways of improving the accuracy of the system are presented.