Reflex Control of Locomotion for a Four—legged Vehicle with Leg Redundancy

Abstract In this paper the problem of controlling the trajectories of the legs of a mobile robot moving through statically stable configurations is considered. Legs are assumed to possess significant weight compared to the chassis, and a degree of redundancy that can be used to maximize the robustness of equilibrium. We assume that an higher level planner provides the global gait patterns and individual foot trajectories. We focus on a real-time, sensor-driven control law, that can be applied to the control of the joint trajectories, while accommodating for unexpected external disturbances according to a "reflex" control policy. In the paper, we refer to an experimental four-legged vehicle being built in our laboratory.

[1]  André Preumont,et al.  On the Gait Control of a Six-Legged Walking Machine , 1995 .

[2]  Fumihito Arai,et al.  An omni-directional six-legged walking robot , 1994, Adv. Robotics.

[3]  Shigeo Hirose,et al.  Design of a quadruped walking vehicle for dynamic walking and stair climbing , 1994, Adv. Robotics.

[4]  Shigeo Hirose,et al.  A Study of Design and Control of a Quadruped Walking Vehicle , 1984 .

[5]  Antonio Bicchi,et al.  Leg-ankle-foot System For Investigating Sensor-based Legged Locomotion , 1989, Proceedings. IEEE/RSJ International Workshop on Intelligent Robots and Systems '. (IROS '89) 'The Autonomous Mobile Robots and Its Applications.

[6]  T. Yoshikawa,et al.  Task-Priority Based Redundancy Control of Robot Manipulators , 1987 .

[7]  Christophe Samson,et al.  Running with constant energy , 1994, Proceedings of the 1994 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[8]  Kenneth J. Waldron,et al.  An Analytical Approach for Gait Study and Its Applications on Wave Gaits , 1987 .

[9]  H. Das,et al.  Inverse kinematic algorithms for redundant systems , 1988, Proceedings. 1988 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[10]  Bruno Siciliano,et al.  Closed-Loop Inverse Kinematics Schemes for Constrained Redundant Manipulators with Task Space Augmentation and Task Priority Strategy , 1991, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[11]  Akihito Sano,et al.  Special Issue on Legged Locomotion , 1993 .

[12]  P. Gonzalez de Santos,et al.  MOTION CONTROL OF A TERRAIN-ADAPTIVE WALKING ROBOT , 1995 .

[13]  Aarne Halme,et al.  Terrain Adaptive Motion and Free Gait of a Six-Legged Walking Machine , 1993 .

[14]  John Kenneth Salisbury,et al.  Contact Sensing from Force Measurements , 1990, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[15]  Bruno Siciliano,et al.  A solution algorithm to the inverse kinematic problem for redundant manipulators , 1988, IEEE J. Robotics Autom..