Torque Saturation in Bipedal Robotic Walking through Control Lyapunov Function Based Quadratic Programs
This work addresses control saturation issues for bipedal robots, which is an incremental improvement over the authors' previous CLF controllers.
The paper tackled the problem of torque saturation in bipedal robotic walking by developing a novel method that directly incorporates user-defined control input saturations into a control Lyapunov function-based controller, resulting in an experimental implementation on the robot MABEL with a 1 kHz update rate.
This paper presents a novel method for directly incorporating user-defined control input saturations into the calculation of a control Lyapunov function (CLF)-based walking controller for a biped robot. Previous work by the authors has demonstrated the effectiveness of CLF controllers for stabilizing periodic gaits for biped walkers, and the current work expands on those results by providing a more effective means for handling control saturations. The new approach, based on a convex optimization routine running at a 1 kHz control update rate, is useful not only for handling torque saturations but also for incorporating a whole family of user-defined constraints into the online computation of a CLF controller. The paper concludes with an experimental implementation of the main results on the bipedal robot MABEL.