Analytical Workspace, Kinematics, and Foot Force Based Stability of Hexapod Walking Robots

Many environments are inaccessible or hazardous for humans. Remaining debris after earthquake and fire, ship hulls, bridge installations, and oil rigs are some examples. For these environments, major effort is being placed into replacing humans with robots for manipulation purposes such as search and rescue, inspection, repair, and maintenance. Mobility, manipulability, and stability are the basic needs for a robot to traverse, maneuver, and manipulate in such irregular and highly obstructed terrain. Hexapod walking robots are as a salient solution because of their extra degrees of mobility, compared to mobile wheeled robots. However, it is essential for any multi-legged walking robot to maintain its stability over the terrain or under external stimuli. For manipulation purposes, the robot must also have a sufficient workspace to satisfy the required manipulability. Therefore, analysis of both workspace and stability becomes very important. An accurate and concise inverse kinematic solution for multi-legged robots is developed and validated. The closed-form solution of lateral and spatial reachable workspace of axially symmetric hexapod walking robots are derived and validated through simulation which aid in the design and optimization of the robot parameters and workspace. To control the stability of the robot, a novel stability margin based on the normal contact forces of the robot is developed and then modified to account for the geometrical and physical attributes of the robot. The margin and its modified version are validated by comparison with a widely known stability criterion through simulated and physical experiments. A control scheme is developed to integrate the workspace and stability of multi-legged walking robots resulting in a bio-inspired reactive control strategy which is validated experimentally

C-CROC: Continuous and Convex Resolution of Centroidal Dynamic Trajectories for Legged Robots in Multicontact Scenarios

International audienceSynthesizing legged locomotion requires planning one or several steps ahead (literally): when and where, and with which effector shouldthe next contact(s) be created between the robot and the environment? Validating a contact candidate implies \textit{a minima} the resolution of a slow, non-linear optimizationproblem, to demonstrate that a Center Of Mass (COM) trajectory, compatible with the contact transition constraints, exists. We propose a conservative reformulation of this trajectory generation problem as a convex 3D linear program, CROC. It results from the observation that if the COM trajectory is a polynomial with only one free variable coefficient, the non-linearity of the problem disappears. This has two consequences. On the positive side, in terms of computation times CROC outperforms the state of the art by at least one order of magnitude, and allows to consider interactive applications (with a planning time roughly equal to the motion time). On the negative side, in our experiments our approach finds a majority of the feasible trajectories found by a non-linear solver, but not all of them. Still, we demonstrate that the solution space covered by CROC is large enough to achieve the automated planning of a large variety of locomotion tasks for different robots, demonstrated in simulation and on the real HRP-2 robot, several of which were rarely seen before.Another significant contribution is the introduction of a Bezier curve representation of the problem, which guarantees that the constraints of the COM trajectory are verified continuously, and not only at discrete points as traditionally done. This formulation is lossless, and results in more robust trajectories. It is not restricted to CROC, but could rather be integrated with any method from the state of the art

Whole-Body End-Pose Planning for High-Degree-of-Freedom Robots on Uneven and Inclined Surfaces

During the last few years there have been significant improvements in the field of humanoid robotics. More powerful workstations capable of running more accurate - and therefore more computationally demanding - simulations, and the rise of new generations of humanoid robots with better hardware, have enabled researchers to keep pushing the boundaries and create novel methods to improve the perception and motion of these robots.Motion planning is the area of robotics which concerns with how and when a robot should move a part of itself, and the execution of such motion. Motion planning has been a thoroughly investigated area, but not all of the challenges related to it are solved yet.Robots with a fixed base and few degrees-of-freedom (DoF), e.g. the industrial robotic arms that revolutionized the automotive industry, have been used as a means to approach the problem of motion planning. Often these type of robots are associated with an isolated environment, in which they do not have to interact with people. Researchers have developed successful motion planning algorithms to operate robots in these environments.Nonetheless, those approaches fall short when humanoid robots are taken into consideration.Applications aimed towards humanoid robots have to take into account the characteristics often associated with them: many DoF, a floating base, and balance and dynamic constraints.Implementing autonomous solutions with safe human interaction in complex and dynamic environments, considering biped balance and possible external interferences is non-trivial.Our goal is to tackle the problem of high dimensional kinematic and dynamic motion planning.Namely, we will focus on the sub-problem of humanoid end-pose planning on uneven terrains

Robustness to external disturbances for legged robots using dynamic trajectory optimisation

In robotics, robustness is an important and desirable attribute of any system, from perception to planning and control. Robotic systems need to handle numerous factors of uncertainty when they are deployed, and the more robust a method is, the fewer chances there are of something going wrong. In planning and control, being robust is crucial to deal with uncertain contact timings and positions, mismatches in the dynamics model of the system, noise in the sensor readings and communication delays. In this thesis, we focus on the problem of dealing with uncertainty and external disturbances applied to the robot. Reactive robustness can be achieved at the control stage using a variety of control schemes. For example, model predictive control approaches are robust against external disturbances thanks to the online high-frequency replanning of the motion being executed. However, taking robustness into account in a proactive way, i.e., during the planning stage itself, enables the adoption of kinematic configurations that allow the system as a whole to better deal with uncertainty and disturbances. To this end, we propose a novel trajectory optimisation framework for robotic systems, ranging from fixed-base manipulators to legged robots, such as humanoids or quadrupeds equipped with arms. We tackle the problem from a first-principles perspective, and define a robustness metric based on the robot’s capabilities, such as the torques available to the system (considering actuator torque limits) and contact stability constraints. We compare our results with other existing approaches and, through simulation and experiments on the real robot, we show that our method is able to plan trajectories that are more robust against external disturbances

Offline and Online Planning and Control Strategies for the Multi-Contact and Biped Locomotion of Humanoid Robots

In the past decades, the Research on humanoid robots made progress forward accomplishing exceptionally dynamic and agile motions. Starting from the DARPA Robotic Challenge in 2015, humanoid platforms have been successfully employed to perform more and more challenging tasks with the eventual aim of assisting or replacing humans in hazardous and stressful working situations. However, the deployment of these complex machines in realistic domestic and working environments still represents a high-level challenge for robotics. Such environments are characterized by unstructured and cluttered settings with continuously varying conditions due to the dynamic presence of humans and other mobile entities, which cannot only compromise the operation of the robotic system but can also pose severe risks both to the people and the robot itself due to unexpected interactions and impacts. The ability to react to these unexpected interactions is therefore a paramount requirement for enabling the robot to adapt its behavior to the task needs and the characteristics of the environment. Further, the capability to move in a complex and varying environment is an essential skill for a humanoid robot for the execution of any task. Indeed, human instructions may often require the robot to move and reach a desired location, e.g., for bringing an object or for inspecting a specific place of an infrastructure. In this context, a flexible and autonomous walking behavior is an essential skill, study of which represents one of the main topics of this Thesis, considering disturbances and unfeasibilities coming both from the environment and dynamic obstacles that populate realistic scenarios.  Locomotion planning strategies are still an open theme in the humanoids and legged robots research and can be classified in sample-based and optimization-based planning algorithms. The first, explore the configuration space, finding a feasible path between the start and goal robot’s configuration with different logic depending on the algorithm. They suffer of a high computational cost that often makes difficult, if not impossible, their online implementations but, compared to their counterparts, they do not need any environment or robot simplification to find a solution and they are probabilistic complete, meaning that a feasible solution can be certainly found if at least one exists. The goal of this thesis is to merge the two algorithms in a coupled offline-online planning framework to generate an offline global trajectory with a sample-based approach to cope with any kind of cluttered and complex environment, and online locally refine it during the execution, using a faster optimization-based algorithm that more suits an online implementation. The offline planner performances are improved by planning in the robot contact space instead of the whole-body robot configuration space, requiring an algorithm that maps the two state spaces.   The framework proposes a methodology to generate whole-body trajectories for the motion of humanoid and legged robots in realistic and dynamically changing environments.  This thesis focuses on the design and test of each component of this planning framework, whose validation is carried out on the real robotic platforms CENTAURO and COMAN+ in various loco-manipulation tasks scenarios. &nbsp

Legged Robots for Object Manipulation: A Review

Legged robots can have a unique role in manipulating objects in dynamic, human-centric, or otherwise inaccessible environments. Although most legged robotics research to date typically focuses on traversing these challenging environments, many legged platform demonstrations have also included "moving an object" as a way of doing tangible work. Legged robots can be designed to manipulate a particular type of object (e.g., a cardboard box, a soccer ball, or a larger piece of furniture), by themselves or collaboratively. The objective of this review is to collect and learn from these examples, to both organize the work done so far in the community and highlight interesting open avenues for future work. This review categorizes existing works into four main manipulation methods: object interactions without grasping, manipulation with walking legs, dedicated non-locomotive arms, and legged teams. Each method has different design and autonomy features, which are illustrated by available examples in the literature. Based on a few simplifying assumptions, we further provide quantitative comparisons for the range of possible relative sizes of the manipulated object with respect to the robot. Taken together, these examples suggest new directions for research in legged robot manipulation, such as multifunctional limbs, terrain modeling, or learning-based control, to support a number of new deployments in challenging indoor/outdoor scenarios in warehouses/construction sites, preserved natural areas, and especially for home robotics.Comment: Preprint of the paper submitted to Frontiers in Mechanical Engineerin