A COMBINED LIMIT CYCLE - ZERO MOMENT POINT BASED APPROACH FOR OMNI-DIRECTIONAL QUADRUPEDAL BOUNDING

In this paper we describe the steps that allowed us to realize real outdoor experiments of HyQ bounding at different speeds and performing omni-directional maneuvers. The strategy is composed of two parts: the first one is an offline optimization that finds a stable periodic limit cycle which represents the baseline bounding gait; the second part is a speed controller that adjusts online the main gait parameters based on the high-level speed commands coming from the external operator. In the tests HyQ reached a forward speed of 2.5m/s, lateral speed of 1m/s and angular speed of 50deg/s in simulation and respectively 1m/s, 0.5m/s and 30deg/s on the hardware experiments.