Legged robots gain real-time stability for complex contact situations
Optimized Wrench Polytope Analysis for Real-Time Stability Control of Legged Robots in Complex Multi-Contact Configurations
Robotics
Summary
Legged robots struggle to walk safely in tricky places like slopes or uneven surfaces. The authors created a faster way to calculate how the robot’s joints should move to keep balance when it touches the ground in different ways. Their method works quickly enough to use in normal robot control and was tested both in simulations and on real robots. This helps robots stay stable in tough spots where older methods fail.
What this means in practice
- •For robotics engineers: Control walking robots to maintain balance in complex multi-contact environments like uneven or cluttered terrain.
- •For industrial automation teams: Enable reliable robot navigation and manipulation in challenging factory or warehouse environments with irregular surfaces and supports.
Authors
Friedrich Graaf, Elias Birkefeld, Christian Eichmann, Elias Hofele, Tristan Schnell, Georg Heppner, Arne Roennau, Rüdiger Dillmann
Abstract
Legged robots offer a variety of automation applications in real-world scenarios. But areas that are difficult to traverse, like slopes, caves, or scaffolding, still pose a great challenge for traversal. To tackle this problem, we propose an optimized algorithm for evaluating the full actuatable wrench polytope for arbitrary contact scenarios. With our improved analysis algorithm, the torques for each joint of the robot can be calculated within a control frequency of 49 Hz. The achieved speedup allows for deployment within a regular control loop for actuating robot poses for different contact scenarios. We evaluated our stability controller extensively in simulation scenarios and validated its applicability by deploying it on actual walking robot hardware. The proposed controller achieved stability in very complex scenarios that are currently not achievable by any other controller.