On-line and on-board planning and perception for quadrupedal locomotion
This work addresses locomotion planning for quadrupeds in rough environments, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing planning methods like ARA*.
The authors tackled the problem of quadrupedal locomotion over challenging terrain by decomposing it into body action and footstep planning, using a lattice representation and movement primitives, and demonstrated performance in experimental trials with on-line and on-board computation.
We present a legged motion planning approach for quadrupedal locomotion over challenging terrain. We decompose the problem into body action planning and footstep planning. We use a lattice representation together with a set of defined body movement primitives for computing a body action plan. The lattice representation allows us to plan versatile movements that ensure feasibility for every possible plan. To this end, we propose a set of rules that define the footstep search regions and footstep sequence given a body action. We use Anytime Repairing A* (ARA*) search that guarantees bounded suboptimal plans. Our main contribution is a planning approach that generates on-line versatile movements. Experimental trials demonstrate the performance of our planning approach in a set of challenging terrain conditions. The terrain information and plans are computed on-line and on-board.