Trajectory planning and posture adjustment of a quadruped robot for obstacle striding

This paper proposes a control method of trajectory planning and posture adjustment for quadruped robots' obstacle striding. The addressed mixed parabola method plans the travelling paths over obstacles in Cartesian coordinate system. The constraints on velocities, accelerations, and jerks at waypoints are employed to generate the time-efficient smooth cubic spline joint trajectories by nonlinear optimization technique. The planned trajectories maximize the compliance and flexibility of joint movements. To guarantee the static stability for the pitch-pitch type quadruped robots, a posture adjustment strategy based on the potential energy is investigated to regulate the trajectory of Center of Gravity (COG). The experimental results on quadruped robot FROG-I (Four-legged Robot for Optimal Gaits) prove the feasibility of the proposed approach of striding a board in natural environment.

[1]  B. Cao,et al.  Constrained time-efficient and smooth cubic spline trajectory generation for industrial robots , 1997 .

[2]  Yasuhiro Fukuoka,et al.  Adaptive Dynamic Walking of a Quadruped Robot on Natural Ground Based on Biological Concepts , 2007, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[3]  Stefan Schaal,et al.  Inverse dynamics control of floating base systems using orthogonal decomposition , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[4]  Jerry E. Pratt,et al.  A Controller for the LittleDog Quadruped Walking on Rough Terrain , 2007, Proceedings 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[5]  Andrew Y. Ng,et al.  Task-space trajectories via cubic spline optimization , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[6]  Martin Buehler,et al.  Modeling and Experiments of Untethered Quadrupedal Running with a Bounding Gait: The Scout II Robot , 2005, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[7]  Chun-Hung Chen,et al.  Motion planning of walking robots in environments with uncertainty , 1996, Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[8]  Thierry Siméon,et al.  Robust motion planning for rough terrain navigation , 1999, Proceedings 1999 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Human and Environment Friendly Robots with High Intelligence and Emotional Quotients (Cat. No.99CH36289).

[9]  Stefan Schaal,et al.  A Robust Quadruped Walking Gait for Traversing Rough Terrain , 2007, Proceedings 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[10]  Pablo González de Santos,et al.  Generating continuous free crab gaits for quadruped robots on irregular terrain , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[11]  Rodney A. Brooks,et al.  Humanoid robots , 2002, CACM.

[12]  Keigo Watanabe,et al.  Translational Crawl and Path Tracking of a Quadruped Robot , 2002, J. Field Robotics.

[13]  Stefan Schaal,et al.  Fast, robust quadruped locomotion over challenging terrain , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[14]  Sung-Ho Park,et al.  Quasi-static obstacle crossing of an animal type four-legged walking machine , 2000, Robotica.

[15]  Juliet.  Humanoid Robots , 2009 .

[16]  Andrew Y. Ng,et al.  A control architecture for quadruped locomotion over rough terrain , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[17]  Kunikatsu Takase,et al.  Towards 3D adaptive dynamic walking of a quadruped robot on irregular terrain by using neural system model , 2001, Proceedings 2001 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Expanding the Societal Role of Robotics in the the Next Millennium (Cat. No.01CH37180).

[18]  D. Orin,et al.  Increasing the stability margin of multilegged vehicles through body sway , 2005 .

[19]  Yasuhiro Fukuoka,et al.  Adaptive Dynamic Walking of a Quadruped Robot on Irregular Terrain Based on Biological Concepts , 2003, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[20]  Pablo González de Santos,et al.  SIL04: a true walking robot for the comparative study of walking machine techniques , 2003, IEEE Robotics Autom. Mag..

[21]  Shugen Ma,et al.  Omnidirectional static walking of a quadruped robot , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[22]  Bin Li,et al.  A method based on Center Pattern Generator for quadruped leg control , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO).