SUMMARY
Push recovery is an essential requirement for a humanoid robot with the objective of safely performing tasks within a real dynamic environment. In this environment, the robot is susceptible to external disturbance that in some cases is inevitable, requiring push recovery strategies to avoid possible falls, damage in humans and the environment. In this paper, a novel push recovery approach to counteract disturbance from any direction and any walking phase is developed. It presents a pattern generator with the ability to be modified according to the push recovery strategy. The result is a humanoid robot that can maintain its balance in the presence of strong disturbance taking into account its magnitude and determining the best push recovery strategy. Push recovery experiments with different disturbance directions have been performed using a 20 DOF Darwin-OP robot. The adaptability and low computational cost of the whole scheme allows is incorporation into an embedded system.