Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 February 2014
Controlling a walking biped robot is a challenging problem due to the robot's complex and uncertain dynamics. In order to tackle this problem, we propose a sliding mode controller based on a dynamic model that we obtained using the conformal geometric algebra (CGA) approach. An important contribution of this paper is the development of algorithms using the CGA framework. The CGA framework permits us to use lines, points, and other geometric entities to obtain the Lagrange equations of the system. The references for the joints of the robot were obtained in a bio-inspired way following the kinematics of a walking human body. The first and second derivatives of the reference signal were obtained via an exact robust differentiator based on a high-order sliding mode. We analyzed the performance of the proposed control schemes by using bio-inspired walking patterns and simulations.