Keep Rollin' - Whole-Body Motion Control and Planning for Wheeled Quadrupedal Robots

We show dynamic locomotion strategies for wheeled quadrupedal robots, which combine the advantages of both walking and driving. The developed optimization framework tightly integrates the additional degrees of freedom introduced by the wheels. Our approach relies on a zero-moment point based motion optimization which continuously updates reference trajectories. The reference motions are tracked by a hierarchical whole-body controller which computes optimal generalized accelerations and contact forces by solving a sequence of prioritized tasks including the nonholonomic rolling constraints. Our approach has been tested on ANYmal, a quadrupedal robot that is fully torque-controlled including the non-steerable wheels attached to its legs. We conducted experiments on flat and inclined terrains as well as over steps, whereby we show that integrating the wheels into the motion control and planning framework results in intuitive motion trajectories, which enable more robust and dynamic locomotion compared to other wheeled-legged robots. Moreover, with a speed of 4 m/s and a reduction of the cost of transport by 83 % we prove the superiority of wheeled-legged robots compared to their legged counterparts.Comment: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letter

Exponential stabilization of driftless nonlinear control systems using homogeneous feedback

This paper focuses on the problem of exponential stabilization of controllable, driftless systems using time-varying, homogeneous feedback. The analysis is performed with respect to a homogeneous norm in a nonstandard dilation that is compatible with the algebraic structure of the control Lie algebra. It can be shown that any continuous, time-varying controller that achieves exponential stability relative to the Euclidean norm is necessarily non-Lipschitz. Despite these restrictions, we provide a set of constructive, sufficient conditions for extending smooth, asymptotic stabilizers to homogeneous, exponential stabilizers. The modified feedbacks are everywhere continuous, smooth away from the origin, and can be extended to a large class of systems with torque inputs. The feedback laws are applied to an experimental mobile robot and show significant improvement in convergence rate over smooth stabilizers

Stabilization Control of the Differential Mobile Robot Using Lyapunov Function and Extended Kalman Filter

This paper presents the design of a control model to navigate the differential mobile robot to reach the desired destination from an arbitrary initial pose. The designed model is divided into two stages: the state estimation and the stabilization control. In the state estimation, an extended Kalman filter is employed to optimally combine the information from the system dynamics and measurements. Two Lyapunov functions are constructed that allow a hybrid feedback control law to execute the robot movements. The asymptotical stability and robustness of the closed loop system are assured. Simulations and experiments are carried out to validate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed approach.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1611.07112, arXiv:1611.0711

Stabilization of non-admissible curves for a class of nonholonomic systems

The problem of tracking an arbitrary curve in the state space is considered for underactuated driftless control-affine systems. This problem is formulated as the stabilization of a time-varying family of sets associated with a neighborhood of the reference curve. An explicit control design scheme is proposed for the class of controllable systems whose degree of nonholonomy is equal to 1. It is shown that the trajectories of the closed-loop system converge exponentially to any given neighborhood of the reference curve provided that the solutions are defined in the sense of sampling. This convergence property is also illustrated numerically by several examples of nonholonomic systems of degrees 1 and 2.Comment: This is the author's version of the manuscript accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the 2019 European Control Conference (ECC'19