Compliant quadruped locomotion over rough terrain

— Many critical elements for statically stable walking for legged robots have been known for a long time, including stability criteria based on support polygons, good foothold selection, recovery strategies to name a few. All these criteria have to be accounted for in the planning as well as the control phase. Most legged robots usually employ high gain position control, which means that it is crucially important that the planned reference trajectories are a good match for the actual terrain, and that tracking is accurate. Such an approach leads to conservative controllers, i.e. relatively low speed, ground speed matching, etc. Not surprisingly such controllers are not very robust – they are not suited for the real world use outside of the laboratory where the knowledge of the world is limited and error prone. Thus, to achieve robust robotic locomotion in the archetypical domain of legged systems, namely complex rough terrain, where the size of the obstacles are in the order of leg...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: IROS
• Authors: Jonas Buchli, Mrinal Kalakrishnan, Michael Mistry, Peter Pastor, Stefan Schaal
• Keywords: IROS 2009, Legged Locomotion, Many Critical Elements, Most Legged Robots, Robotics