Planning and Execution of Dynamic Motion Locomotion for a Quadruped on Challenging Terrain (ICRA'15) HD

Planning and Execution of Dynamic Whole-Body Locomotion for a Hydraulic Quadruped on Challenging Terrain Alexander W. Winkler, Carlos Mastalli, Ioannis Havoutis, Michele Focchi, Darwin G. Caldwell, Claudio Semini IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2015 Abstract— We present a framework for dynamic quadrupedal locomotion over challenging terrain, where the choice of appropriate footholds is crucial for the success of the behaviour. We build a model of the environment on-line and on-board using an efficient occupancy grid representation. We use Any-time-Repairing A* (ARA*) to search over a tree of possible actions, choose a rough body path and select the locally-best footholds accordingly. We run a n-step lookahead optimization of the body trajectory using a dynamic stability metric, the Zero Moment Point (ZMP), that generates natural dynamic whole-body motions. A combination of floating-base inverse dynamics and virtual model control accurately executes the desired motions on an actively compliant system. Experimental trials show that this framework allows us to traverse terrains at nearly 6 times the speed of our previous work, evaluated over the same set of trials. Official paper download link at publisher: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7139916/. Pre-prints of all our papers can be found here: http://www.iit.it/hyq (Publications) The following publication provide the more details about the foothold planner and terrain costmap computation. C. Mastalli, A. Winkler, I. Havoutis, D. G. Caldwell, C. Semini, On-line and On-board Planning and Perception for Quadrupedal Locomotion, IEEE International Conference on Technologies for Practical Robot Applications (TEPRA), 2015.