The Actuation-consistent Wrench Polytope (AWP) and the Feasible Wrench Polytope (FWP)
This work addresses motion planning for legged robots, offering tools to respect friction cones and actuation limits, which is incremental as it builds on existing planning methods.
The paper tackles the problem of motion planning for legged locomotion by defining two new 6D polytopes, the Actuation-consistent Wrench Polytope (AWP) and Feasible Wrench Polytope (FWP), to exploit robot actuation capabilities for minimizing joint torques or maximizing propulsion as needed.
The motivation of our current research is to devise motion planners for legged locomotion that are able to exploit the robot's actuation capabilities. This means, when possible, to minimize joint torques or to propel as much as admissible when required. For this reason we define two new 6 dimensional bounded polytopes that we name Actuation-consistent Wrench Polytope (AWP) and Feasible Wrench Polytope (FWP). These objects turn out to be very useful in motion planning for the definition of constraints on the accelerations of the Center of Mass of the robot that respect the friction cones and the actuation limits. The AWP and the FWP could be used also in the robot design phase to size the actuators of the system based on some predefined reference motion.