TY - JOUR
T1 - Motion planning for quadrupedal locomotion: Coupled planning, terrain mapping, and whole-body control
AU - Mastalli, Carlos
AU - Havoutis, Ioannis
AU - Focchi, Michele
AU - Caldwell, Darwin G.
AU - Semini, Claudio
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received March 10, 2020; accepted June 8, 2020. Date of publication July 3, 2020; date of current version December 3, 2020. This work was supported by MEMMO and HyQ-REAL European projects, The Alan Turing Institute and the UKRI/EPSRC under Grants EP/R026084/1, EP/R026173/1, and EP/S002383/1. MEMMO is a collaborative project supported by European Union within the H2020 Program, under Grant Agreement 780684. HyQ-REAL is part of the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under Grant Agreement 601116 which belongs to the ECHORD++ (The European Coordination Hub for Open Robotics Development). This article was recommended for publication by Associate Editor P.-C. Lin and Editor E. Yoshida upon evaluation of the reviewers’ comments. (Corresponding author: Carlos Mastalli.) Carlos Mastalli is with the Dynamic Legged Systems (Lab), Istituto Ital-iano di Tecnologia, 16163 Genova, Italy, and also with the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, South Bridge EH8 9YL, U.K. (e-mail: [email protected]).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2004-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2020/12/3
Y1 - 2020/12/3
N2 - Planning whole-body motions while taking into account the terrain conditions is a challenging problem for legged robots since the terrain model might produce many local minima. Our coupled planning method uses stochastic and derivatives-free search to plan both foothold locations and horizontal motions due to the local minima produced by the terrain model. It jointly optimizes body motion, step duration and foothold selection, and it models the terrain as a cost-map. Due to the novel attitude planning method, the horizontal motion plans can be applied to various terrain conditions. The attitude planner ensures the robot stability by imposing limits to the angular acceleration. Our whole-body controller tracks compliantly trunk motions while avoiding slippage, as well as kinematic and torque limits. Despite the use of a simplified model, which is restricted to flat terrain, our approach shows remarkable capability to deal with a wide range of noncoplanar terrains. The results are validated by experimental trials and comparative evaluations in a series of terrains of progressively increasing complexity.
AB - Planning whole-body motions while taking into account the terrain conditions is a challenging problem for legged robots since the terrain model might produce many local minima. Our coupled planning method uses stochastic and derivatives-free search to plan both foothold locations and horizontal motions due to the local minima produced by the terrain model. It jointly optimizes body motion, step duration and foothold selection, and it models the terrain as a cost-map. Due to the novel attitude planning method, the horizontal motion plans can be applied to various terrain conditions. The attitude planner ensures the robot stability by imposing limits to the angular acceleration. Our whole-body controller tracks compliantly trunk motions while avoiding slippage, as well as kinematic and torque limits. Despite the use of a simplified model, which is restricted to flat terrain, our approach shows remarkable capability to deal with a wide range of noncoplanar terrains. The results are validated by experimental trials and comparative evaluations in a series of terrains of progressively increasing complexity.
KW - Challenging terrain
KW - legged locomotion
KW - terrain mapping
KW - trajectory optimization
KW - whole-body control
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85088803430&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/TRO.2020.3003464
DO - 10.1109/TRO.2020.3003464
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85088803430
SN - 1552-3098
VL - 36
SP - 1635
EP - 1648
JO - IEEE Transactions on Robotics
JF - IEEE Transactions on Robotics
IS - 6
ER -