Autonomous Motion
Note: This department has relocated.

A robust quadruped walking gait for traversing rough terrain

2007

Conference Paper

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Legged locomotion excels when terrains become too rough for wheeled systems or open-loop walking pattern generators to succeed, i.e., when accurate foot placement is of primary importance in successfully reaching the task goal. In this paper we address the scenario where the rough terrain is traversed with a static walking gait, and where for every foot placement of a leg, the location of the foot placement was selected irregularly by a planning algorithm. Our goal is to adjust a smooth walking pattern generator with the selection of every foot placement such that the COG of the robot follows a stable trajectory characterized by a stability margin relative to the current support triangle. We propose a novel parameterization of the COG trajectory based on the current position, velocity, and acceleration of the four legs of the robot. This COG trajectory has guaranteed continuous velocity and acceleration profiles, which leads to continuous velocity and acceleration profiles of the leg movement, which is ideally suited for advanced model-based controllers. Pitch, yaw, and ground clearance of the robot are easily adjusted automatically under any terrain situation. We evaluate our gait generation technique on the Little-Dog quadruped robot when traversing complex rocky and sloped terrains.

Author(s): Pongas, D. and Mistry, M. and Schaal, S.
Book Title: International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA2007)
Pages: 1474-1479
Year: 2007

Department(s): Autonomous Motion
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (inproceedings)

Address: Rome, April 10-14, 2007
Cross Ref: p2668
Note: clmc
URL: http://www-clmc.usc.edu/publications/P/pongas-ICRA2007.pdf

BibTex

@inproceedings{Pongas_ICRA_2007,
  title = {A robust quadruped walking gait for traversing rough terrain},
  author = {Pongas, D. and Mistry, M. and Schaal, S.},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA2007)},
  pages = {1474-1479},
  address = {Rome, April 10-14, 2007},
  year = {2007},
  note = {clmc},
  doi = {},
  crossref = {p2668},
  url = {http://www-clmc.usc.edu/publications/P/pongas-ICRA2007.pdf}
}