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Title: Quadrupedal Robotic Walking on Sloped Terrains via Exact Decomposition into Coupled Bipedal Robots
Can we design motion primitives for complex legged systems uniformly for different terrain types without neglecting modeling details? This paper presents a method for rapidly generating quadrupedal locomotion on sloped terrains-from modeling to gait generation, to hardware demonstration. At the core of this approach is the observation that a quadrupedal robot can be exactly decomposed into coupled bipedal robots. Formally, this is represented through the framework of coupled control systems, wherein isolated subsystems interact through coupling constraints. We demonstrate this concept in the context of quadrupeds and use it to reduce the gait planning problem for uneven terrains to bipedal walking generation via hybrid zero dynamics. This reduction method allows for the formulation of a nonlinear optimization problem that leverages low-dimensional bipedal representations to generate dynamic walking gaits on slopes for the full-order quadrupedal robot dynamics. The result is the ability to rapidly generate quadrupedal walking gaits on a variety of slopes. We demonstrate these walking behaviors on the Vision 60 quadrupedal robot; in simulation, via walking on a range of sloped terrains of 13°, 15°, 20°, 25°, and, experimentally, through the successful locomotion of 13° and 20° ~ 25° sloped outdoor grasslands.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1924526 1923239
NSF-PAR ID:
10281496
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
4006 to 4011
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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