Design and Dynamic Locomotion Control of Quadruped Robot with Perception-Less Terrain Adaptation

Lei Wang; Libo Meng; Ru Kang; Botao Liu; Sai Gu; Zhihao Zhang; Fei Meng; Aiguo Ming

doi:10.34133/2022/9816495

Design and Dynamic Locomotion Control of Quadruped Robot with Perception-Less Terrain Adaptation

Cyborg Bionic Syst. 2022 Feb 22:2022:9816495. doi: 10.34133/2022/9816495. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Lei Wang^{1

2}, Libo Meng^{2

3}, Ru Kang^{1

2}, Botao Liu^{1

2}, Sai Gu^{1

2}, Zhihao Zhang^{1

2}, Fei Meng^{1

2}, Aiguo Ming^{2

3}

Affiliations

¹ Intelligent Robotics Institute, School of Mechatronical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China.
² Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Intelligent Robots and Systems, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China.
³ Department of Mechanical Engineering and Intelligent Systems, The University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo 182-8585, Japan.

Abstract

In this paper, a parallel quadrupedal robot was designed that is capable of versatile dynamic locomotion and perception-less terrain adaptation. Firstly, a quadrupedal robot with a symmetric legs and a powerful actuator was implemented for highly dynamic movement. Then, a fast and reliable method based on generalized least square was proposed for estimating the terrain parameters by fusing the body, leg, and contact information. On the basis of virtual model control (VMC) with the quadratic program (QP) method, the optimal foot force for terrain adaptation was achieved. Finally, the results obtained by simulation and indoor and outdoor experiments demonstrate that the robot can achieve a robust and versatile dynamic locomotion on uneven terrain, and the rejection of disturbances is reliable, which proves the effectiveness and robustness of this proposed method.