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1. Time-Varying ALIP Model and Robust Foot-Placement Control for Underactuated Bipedal Robotic Walking on a Swaying Rigid Surface

   https://doi.org/10.23919/ACC55779.2023.10156254  

   Gao, Yuan; Gong, Yukai; Paredes, Victor; Hereid, Ayonga; Gu, Yan (May 2023, Proceedings of the American Control Conference)

   Controller design for bipedal walking on dynamic rigid surfaces (DRSes), which are rigid surfaces moving in the inertial frame (e.g., ships and airplanes), remains largely underexplored. This paper introduces a hierarchical control approach that achieves stable underactuated bipedal walking on a horizontally oscillating DRS. The highest layer of our approach is a real-time motion planner that generates desired global behaviors (i.e., center of mass trajectories and footstep locations) by stabilizing a reduced-order robot model. One key novelty of this layer is the derivation of the reduced-order model by analytically extending the angular momentum based linear inverted pendulum (ALIP) model from stationary to horizontally moving surfaces. The other novelty is the development of a discrete-time foot-placement controller that exponentially stabilizes the hybrid, linear, time-varying ALIP. The middle layer translates the desired global behaviors into the robot’s full-body reference trajectories for all directly actuated degrees of freedom, while the lowest layer exponentially tracks those reference trajectories based on the full-order, hybrid, nonlinear robot model. Simulations confirm that the proposed framework ensures stable walking of a planar underactuated biped under different swaying DRS motions and gait types. 

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2. Analytical solution to a time-varying LIP model for quadrupedal walking on a vertically oscillating surface

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mechatronics.2023.103073  

   Iqbal, Amir; Veer, Sushant; Gu, Yan (December 2023, Mechatronics)

   Sun, Weichao; Yao, Bin (Ed.)

   This paper introduces an analytically tractable and computationally efficient model for legged robot dynamics during locomotion on a dynamic rigid surface (DRS), along with an approximate analytical solution and a real-time walking pattern generator synthesized based on the model and solution. By relaxing the static-surface assumption, we extend the classical, time-invariant linear inverted pendulum (LIP) model for legged locomotion on a static surface to dynamic-surface locomotion, resulting in a time-varying LIP model termed as “DRS-LIP”. Sufficient and necessary stability conditions of the time-varying DRS-LIP model are obtained based on the Floquet theory. This model is also transformed into Mathieu’s equation to derive an approximate analytical solution that provides reasonable accuracy with a relatively low computational cost. Using the extended model and its solution, a walking pattern generator is developed to efficiently plan physically feasible trajectories for quadrupedal walking on a vertically oscillating surface. Finally, simulations and hardware experiments from a Laikago quadrupedal robot walking on a pitching treadmill (with a maximum vertical acceleration of 1 m/s ) confirm the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed analytical solution, as well as the efficiency, feasibility, and robustness of the pattern generator, under various surface motions and gait parameters. 

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3. Resolved Motion Control for 3D Underactuated Bipedal Walking using Linear Inverted Pendulum Dynamics and Neural Adaptation

   https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9982009  

   Paredes, Victor C.; Hereid, Ayonga (October 2022, 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS))

   We present a framework to generate periodic trajectory references for a 3D under-actuated bipedal robot, using a linear inverted pendulum (LIP) based controller with adaptive neural regulation. We use the LIP template model to estimate the robot's center of mass (CoM) position and velocity at the end of the current step, and formulate a discrete controller that determines the next footstep location to achieve a desired walking profile. This controller is equipped on the frontal plane with a Neural-Network-based adaptive term that reduces the model mismatch between the template and physical robot that particularly affects the lateral motion. Then, the foot placement location computed for the LIP model is used to generate task space trajectories (CoM and swing foot trajectories) for the actual robot to realize stable walking. We use a fast, real-time QP-based inverse kinematics algorithm that produces joint references from the task space trajectories, which makes the formulation independent of the knowledge of the robot dynamics. Finally, we implemented and evaluated the proposed approach in simulation and hardware experiments with a Digit robot obtaining stable periodic locomotion for both cases. 

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4. From Bipedal Walking to Quadrupedal Locomotion: Full-Body Dynamics Decomposition for Rapid Gait Generation

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA40945.2020.9196841  

   Ma, Wen-Loong; Ames, Aaron D. (January 2020, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA))

   null (Ed.)

   This paper systematically decomposes a quadrupedal robot into bipeds to rapidly generate walking gaits and then recomposes these gaits to obtain quadrupedal locomotion. We begin by decomposing the full-order, nonlinear and hybrid dynamics of a three-dimensional quadrupedal robot, including its continuous and discrete dynamics, into two bipedal systems that are subject to external forces. Using the hybrid zero dynamics (HZD) framework, gaits for these bipedal robots can be rapidly generated (on the order of seconds) along with corresponding controllers. The decomposition is achieved in such a way that the bipedal walking gaits and controllers can be composed to yield dynamic walking gaits for the original quadrupedal robot - the result is the rapid generation of dynamic quadruped gaits utilizing the full-order dynamics. This methodology is demonstrated through the rapid generation (3.96 seconds on average) of four stepping-in-place gaits and one diagonally symmetric ambling gait at 0.35 m/s on a quadrupedal robot - the Vision 60, with 36 state variables and 12 control inputs - both in simulation and through outdoor experiments. This suggested a new approach for fast quadrupedal trajectory planning using full-body dynamics, without the need for empirical model simplification, wherein methods from dynamic bipedal walking can be directly applied to quadrupeds. 

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5. Adaptive Ankle Torque Control for Bipedal Humanoid Walking on Surfaces with Unknown Horizontal and Vertical Motion

   Stewart, Jacob; Chang, I-Chia; Gu, Yan; Ioannou, Petros A (July 2025, IEEE; American Control Conference)

   Achieving stable bipedal walking on surfaces with unknown motion remains a challenging control problem due to the hybrid, time-varying, partially unknown dynamics of the robot and the difficulty of accurate state and surface motion estimation. Surface motion imposes uncertainty on both system parameters and non-homogeneous disturbance in the walking robot dynamics. In this paper, we design an adaptive ankle torque controller to simultaneously address these two uncertainties and propose a step-length planner to minimize the required control torque. Typically, an adaptive controller is used for a continuous system. To apply adaptive control on a hybrid system such as a walking robot, an intermediate command profile is introduced to ensure a continuous error system. Simulations on a planar bipedal robot, along with comparisons against a baseline controller, demonstrate that the proposed approach effectively ensures stable walking and accurate tracking under unknown, time-varying disturbances. 

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