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Wheeled-legged robots combine the efficiency of wheeled robots when driving on suitably flat surfaces and versatility of legged robots when stepping over or around obstacles. This paper introduces a planning and control framework to realise dynamic locomotion for wheeled biped robots. We propose the Cart-Linear Inverted Pendulum Model (Cart-LIPM) as a template model for the rolling motion and the under-actuated LIPM for contact changes while walking. The generated motion is then tracked by an inverse dynamic whole-body controller which coordinates all joints, including the wheels. The framework has a hierarchical structure and is implemented in a model predictive control (MPC) fashion. To validate the proposed approach for hybrid motion generation, two scenarios involving different types of obstacles are designed in simulation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that such online dynamic hybrid locomotion has been demonstrated on wheeled biped robots.
This paper studies jumping for wheeled-bipedal robots, a motion that takes full advantage of the benefits from the hybrid wheeled and legged design features. A comprehensive hierarchical scheme for motion planning and control of jumping with wheeled-bipedal robots is developed. Underactuation of the wheeled-bipedal dynamics is the main difficulty to be addressed, especially in the planning problem. To tackle this issue, a novel wheeled-spring-loaded inverted pendulum (W-SLIP) model is proposed to characterize the essential dynamics of wheeled-bipedal robots during jumping. Relying on a differential-flatness-like property of the W-SLIP model, a tractable quadratic programming based solution is devised for planning jumping motions for wheeled-bipedal robots. Combined with a kinematic planning scheme accounting for the flight phase motion, a complete planning scheme for the W-SLIP model is developed. To enable accurate tracking of the planned trajectories, a linear quadratic regulator based wheel controller and a task-space whole-body controller for the other joints are blended through disturbance observers. The overall planning and control scheme is validated using V-REP simulations of a prototype wheeled-bipedal robot.
Planning smooth and energy-efficient motions for wheeled mobile robots is a central task for applications ranging from autonomous driving to service and intralogistic robotics. Over the past decades, a wide variety of motion planners, steer functions and path-improvement techniques have been proposed for such non-holonomic systems. With the objective of comparing this large assortment of state-of-the-art motion-planning techniques, we introduce a novel open-source motion-planning benchmark for wheeled mobile robots, whose scenarios resemble real-world applications (such as navigating warehouses, moving in cluttered cities or parking), and propose metrics for planning efficiency and path quality. Our benchmark is easy to use and extend, and thus allows practitioners and researchers to evaluate new motion-planning algorithms, scenarios and metrics easily. We use our benchmark to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of several common state-of-the-art motion planners and provide recommendations on when they should be used.
Whole-body control (WBC) is a generic task-oriented control method for feedback control of loco-manipulation behaviors in humanoid robots. The combination of WBC and model-based walking controllers has been widely utilized in various humanoid robots. However, to date, the WBC method has not been employed for unsupported passive-ankle dynamic locomotion. As such, in this paper, we devise a new WBC, dubbed whole-body locomotion controller (WBLC), that can achieve experimental dynamic walking on unsupported passive-ankle biped robots. A key aspect of WBLC is the relaxation of contact constraints such that the control commands produce reduced jerk when switching foot contacts. To achieve robust dynamic locomotion, we conduct an in-depth analysis of uncertainty for our dynamic walking algorithm called time-to-velocity-reversal (TVR) planner. The uncertainty study is fundamental as it allows us to improve the control algorithms and mechanical structure of our robot to fulfill the tolerated uncertainty. In addition, we conduct extensive experimentation for: 1) unsupported dynamic balancing (i.e. in-place stepping) with a six degree-of-freedom (DoF) biped, Mercury; 2) unsupported directional walking with Mercury; 3) walking over an irregular and slippery terrain with Mercury; and 4) in-place walking with our newly designed ten-DoF viscoelastic liquid-cooled biped, DRACO. Overall, the main contributions of this work are on: a) achieving various modalities of unsupported dynamic locomotion of passive-ankle bipeds using a WBLC controller and a TVR planner, b) conducting an uncertainty analysis to improve the mechanical structure and the controllers of Mercury, and c) devising a whole-body control strategy that reduces movement jerk during walking.
Euclidean Signed Distance Field (ESDF) is useful for online motion planning of aerial robots since it can easily query the distance and gradient information against obstacles. Fast incrementally built ESDF map is the bottleneck for conducting real-time motion planning. In this paper, we investigate this problem and propose a mapping system called FIESTA to build global ESDF map incrementally. By introducing two independent updating queues for inserting and deleting obstacles separately, and using Indexing Data Structures and Doubly Linked Lists for map maintenance, our algorithm updates as few as possible nodes using a BFS framework. Our ESDF map has high computational performance and produces near-optimal results. We show our method outperforms other up-to-date methods in term of performance and accuracy by both theory and experiments. We integrate FIESTA into a completed quadrotor system and validate it by both simulation and onboard experiments. We release our method as open-source software for the community.
This paper presents a search-based partial motion planner to generate dynamically feasible trajectories for car-like robots in highly dynamic environments. The planner searches for smooth, safe, and near-time-optimal trajectories by exploring a state graph built on motion primitives, which are generated by discretizing the time dimension and the control space. To enable fast online planning, we first propose an efficient path searching algorithm based on the aggregation and pruning of motion primitives. We then propose a fast collision checking algorithm that takes into account the motions of moving obstacles. The algorithm linearizes relative motions between the robot and obstacles and then checks collisions by comparing a point-line distance. Benefiting from the fast searching and collision checking algorithms, the planner can effectively and safely explore the state-time space to generate near-time-optimal solutions. The results through extensive experiments show that the proposed method can generate feasible trajectories within milliseconds while maintaining a higher success rate than up-to-date methods, which significantly demonstrates its advantages.