Planning Natural Locomotion for Articulated Soft Quadrupeds

Embedding elastic elements into legged robots through mechanical design enables highly efficient oscillating patterns that resemble natural gaits. However, current trajectory planning techniques miss the opportunity of taking advantage of these natural motions. This work proposes a locomotion planning method that aims to unify traditional trajectory generation with modal oscillations. Our method utilizes task-space linearized modes for generating center of mass trajectories on the sagittal plane. We then use nonlinear optimization to find the gait timings that match these trajectories within the Divergent Component of Motion planning framework. This way, we can robustly translate the modes-aware centroidal motions into joint coordinates. We validate our approach with promising results and insights through experiments on a compliant quadrupedal robot

Manipulation corps complet

International audienceWhole-body manipulation refers to the manipulation of objects that necessitate the use of all or most of the degrees of freedom of a robot beyond the use of its arms. This term usually applies to robots with kinematic structures that are more complicated than a fixed-base manipulator, for example, humanoid robots. Robots capable of whole-body manipulation are generally not grounded to the floor and very redundant. A humanoid robot moving a cabinet is a prime example where movement of the entire body is necessary to manipulate the object