ABSTRACT
Until now, planetary exploration has been accomplished with whee-led vehicles, making movement in highly complex, sandy, and sloping terrain incredibly tough. On the other hand, legged robots have come a long way in the last decade and have reached a stage of development where practical applications appear to be possible. To collect critical scientific data, legged robots can overcome wheeled vehicles’ difficulties when exploring harsh environments like impact craters. As a result, there is a need to develop simple, stable walking controllers given the limited power resources and reserve maximum onboard computing for scientific equipment while exploring such regions. This work proposes a walking controller for legged robots that is computationally efficient at runtime for traversing planetary terrains. We implement this walking controller on our custom-built quadruped, using learned linear feedback policies that modulate the end-foot trajectories. The proposed walking controller can traverse various planetary terrains such as flat, sloped, rugged, loose, and lower-than-Earth gravity conditions in simulation environments. Our controller outperforms the baseline open-loop controller on planetary landscapes by reducing slippage and increasing stability. We have also provided preliminary hardware testing results of our controller. In addition, video results can be found at: https://youtu.be/La3y-xhWm1U
- Philip Arm, Radek Zenkl, Patrick Barton, Lars Beglinger, Alex Dietsche, Luca Ferrazzini, Elias Hampp, Jan Hinder, Camille Huber, David Schaufelberger, Felix Schmitt, Benjamin Sun, Boris Stolz, Hendrik Kolvenbach, and Marco Hutter. 2019. SpaceBok: A Dynamic Legged Robot for Space Exploration. In 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). 6288–6294. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA.2019.8794136Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sebastian Bartsch, Timo Birnschein, Florian Cordes, Daniel Kuehn, Peter Kampmann, Jens Hilljegerdes, Steffen Planthaber, Malte Roemmermann, and Frank Kirchner. 2010. SpaceClimber: Development of a Six-Legged Climbing Robot for Space Exploration. In ISR 2010 (41st International Symposium on Robotics) and ROBOTIK 2010 (6th German Conference on Robotics). 1–8.Google Scholar
- M. G. Bekker. 1969. Introduction to terrain-vehicle systems. University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
- Gerardo Bledt, Matthew J. Powell, Benjamin Katz, Jared Di Carlo, Patrick M. Wensing, and Sangbae Kim. 2018. MIT Cheetah 3: Design and Control of a Robust, Dynamic Quadruped Robot. In 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). 2245–2252. https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS.2018.8593885Google ScholarDigital Library
- Katie Byl, Alexander C. Shkolnik, Sam Prentice, Nicholas Roy, and Russ Tedrake. 2008. Reliable Dynamic Motions for a Stiff Quadruped. In ISER.Google Scholar
- Jared Di Carlo, Patrick M. Wensing, Benjamin Katz, Gerardo Bledt, and Sangbae Kim. 2018. Dynamic Locomotion in the MIT Cheetah 3 Through Convex Model-Predictive Control. In 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS.2018.8594448Google ScholarDigital Library
- Spenneberg Dirk and Kirchner Frank. 2007. The Bio-Inspired SCORPION Robot: Design, Control & Lessons Learned.Google Scholar
- Marco Hutter, Christian Gehring, Andreas Lauber, Fabian Günther, Dario Bellicoso, Vassilios Tsounis, Péter Fankhauser, Remo Diethelm, Samuel Bachmann, Michael Blösch, Hendrik Kolvenbach, Marko Bjelonic, Linus Isler, and Konrad Meyer. 2017. ANYmal - toward legged robots for harsh environments. Advanced Robotics 31 (2017), 918 – 931.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Hendrik Kolvenbach, Philip Arm, Elias Hampp, Alexander Dietsche, Valentin Bickel, Benjamin Sun, Christoph Meyer, and Marco Hutter. 2021. Traversing Steep and Granular Martian Analog Slopes With a Dynamic Quadrupedal Robot. arxiv:2106.01974 [cs.RO]Google Scholar
- Viktor Makoviychuk, Lukasz Wawrzyniak, Yunrong Guo, Michelle Lu, Kier Storey, Miles Macklin, David Hoeller, Nikita Rudin, Arthur Allshire, Ankur Handa, and Gavriel State. 2021. Isaac Gym: High Performance GPU-Based Physics Simulation For Robot Learning. arxiv:2108.10470 [cs.RO]Google Scholar
- Horia Mania, Aurelia Guy, and Benjamin Recht. 2018. Simple random search provides a competitive approach to reinforcement learning. arxiv:1803.07055 [cs.LG]Google Scholar
- Takahiro Miki, Joonho Lee, Jemin Hwangbo, Lorenz Wellhausen, Vladlen Koltun, and Marco Hutter. 2022. Learning robust perceptive locomotion for quadrupedal robots in the wild. Science Robotics 7, 62 (2022), eabk2822. https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.abk2822 arXiv:https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/scirobotics.abk2822Google ScholarCross Ref
- Kartik Paigwar, Lokesh Krishna, Sashank Tirumala, Naman Khetan, Aditya Sagi, Ashish Joglekar, Shalabh Bhatnagar, Ashitava Ghosal, Bharadwaj Amrutur, and Shishir Kolathaya. 2020. Robust Quadrupedal Locomotion on Sloped Terrains: A Linear Policy Approach. arxiv:2010.16342 [cs.RO]Google Scholar
- Jerry Pratt, John Carff, Sergey Drakunov, and Ambarish Goswami. 2006. Capture Point: A Step toward Humanoid Push Recovery. In 2006 6th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots. 200–207. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICHR.2006.321385Google ScholarCross Ref
- Maurice Rahme, Ian Abraham, Matthew L. Elwin, and Todd D. Murphey. 2020. Dynamics and Domain Randomized Gait Modulation with Bezier Curves for Sim-to-Real Legged Locomotion. arxiv:2010.12070 [cs.RO]Google Scholar
- Marc H. Raibert. 1986. Legged Robots That Balance. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nikita Rudin, Hendrik Kolvenbach, Vassilios Tsounis, and Marco Hutter. 2022. Cat-Like Jumping and Landing of Legged Robots in Low Gravity Using Deep Reinforcement Learning. IEEE Transactions on Robotics 38, 1 (Feb 2022), 317–328. https://doi.org/10.1109/tro.2021.3084374Google ScholarCross Ref
- H. Shibly, K. Iagnemma, and S. Dubowsky. 2005. An equivalent soil mechanics formulation for rigid wheels in deformable terrain, with application to planetary exploration rovers. Journal of Terramechanics 42, 1 (2005), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jterra.2004.05.002Google ScholarCross Ref
- Alessandro Tasora, Radu Serban, Hammad Mazhar, Arman Pazouki, Daniel Melanz, Jonathan A. Fleischmann, Michael Taylor, Hiroyuki Sugiyama, and Dan Negrut. 2015. Chrono: An Open Source Multi-physics Dynamics Engine. In HPCSE.Google Scholar
- Brian Wilcox, Todd Litwin, Jeff Biesiadecki, Jaret Matthews, Matt Heverly, Jack Morrison, Julie Townsend, Norman Ahmad, Allen Sirota, and Brian Cooper. 2007. ATHLETE: A cargo handling and manipulation robot for the moon. Journal of Field Robotics 24 (05 2007), 421–434. https://doi.org/10.1002/rob.20193Google ScholarCross Ref
- Zhaoming Xie, Xingye Da, Buck Babich, Animesh Garg, and Michiel van de Panne. 2021. GLiDE: Generalizable Quadrupedal Locomotion in Diverse Environments with a Centroidal Model. arxiv:2104.09771 [cs.RO]Google Scholar
- F Zhou, RE Arvidson, K Bennett, K Iagnemma, C Senatore, R Lindemann, B Trease, P Bellutta, and S Maxwell. 2013. Simulating Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity Drives Using Artemis. In 44th Annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Realizing Linear Controllers for Quadruped Robots on Planetary Terrains
Recommendations
Improving traversability of quadruped walking robots using body movement in 3D rough terrains
This paper presents a study on improving the traversability of a quadruped walking robot in 3D rough terrains. The key idea is to exploit body movement of the robot. The position and orientation of the robot are systematically adjusted and the ...
Quadruped pronking on compliant terrains using a reaction wheel
2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)While legged locomotion is a rapidly advancing area in robotics, several issues regarding the performance of such robots on deformable ground are still open. In this paper, we generate a pronking gait on a quadruped robot using a controller, which takes ...
Autonomous evolution of dynamic gaits with two quadruped robots
A challenging task that must be accomplished for every legged robot is creating the walking and running behaviors needed for it to move. In this paper we describe our system for autonomously evolving dynamic gaits on two of Sony's quadruped robots. Our ...
Comments