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In this paper a controller has been presented based on the predictive control to drive and control the bipedal Nao robot. One of the challenges in the practical applying of these types of controllers is their high computational loading and the time-consuming control operations in each time step, in which it is suggested to use Laguerre Functions to reduce the computational loading of the predictive controller. In this study, at first using the conventional methods for the identification, and via the real data obtained from the Nao robot in Mechatronics research center of Qazvin Azad University, a proper model is proposed for walking the Nao robot which is considered as a two-dimensional motion in the plane. Then a controller will be designed to control the robot motion using the model based predictive controller. The purpose of this control approach in the first place is to stabilize the walking of the robot and then to guide and keep it on the desired trajectory, so that this trajectory tracking can be performed well as much as possible. Moreover, in order to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed controller, this controller has been compared with a proportional-integral-derivative controller and will be studied. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed controller performance in the robot trajectory tracking, which finally comparing the obtained results from both of the control approaches, indicates the efficiency and different capabilities of the proposed method in this study.

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This paper investigated the imitation of human motions by a NAO humanoid robot which can be regarded as a human-robot interaction research. In this research, first, human motion is captured by a Kinect 3-dimentional camera through a Robot Operating System (ROS) package. Captured motion is then mapped into the robot’s dimension due to the differences between human and humanoid robot dimensions. After performing the mapping procedure, the solution of both forward and inverse kinematic problem of the robot are solved. To this end, a “Distal” form of forward kinematics solution of the NAO humanoid robot is computed and based on the latter form an analytical inverse kinematics solution for the whole-body imitation purpose is used. The foregoing issue, as one of the contributions of this paper, can be regarded as one of the main reason for obtaining a smooth imitation. In order to keep the robot’s stability during the imitation, an ankle strategy based on a Linear Inverted Pendulum Model (LIPM) and the Ground projection of the Center of Mass (GCoM) criteria is introduced. Moreover, the latter LIPM is controlled by a Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller for two cases, namely, double and single support phases. Considering the limitation on the motion capture device, from experimental and simulation results obtained by implementing the proposed method on a NAO-H25 Version4 it can be inferred that the robot exhibits an accurate, smooth and fast whole-body motion imitation.