Safe Adaptive Switching among Dynamical Movement Primitives: Application to 3D Limit-Cycle Walkers
This addresses safety and adaptability in robotic motion planning for dynamic systems like walkers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing control-theoretic tools.
The paper tackles the problem of generating safe motion plans for robots by switching among dynamical movement primitives, especially under external disturbances, and demonstrates its framework on a 3D bipedal robot that adapts walking to persistent forces.
Complex motions for robots are frequently generated by switching among a collection of individual movement primitives. We use this approach to formulate robot motion plans as sequences of primitives to be executed one after the other. When dealing with dynamical movement primitives, besides accomplishing the high-level objective, planners must also reason about the effect of the plan's execution on the safety of the platform. This task becomes more daunting in the presence of disturbances, such as external forces. To alleviate this issue, we present a framework that builds on rigorous control-theoretic tools to generate safely-executable motion plans for externally excited robotic systems. Our framework is illustrated on a 3D limit-cycle gait bipedal robot that adapts its walking pattern to persistent external forcing.