Modeling and Control of a Hybrid Wheeled Jumping Robot
This work addresses the challenge of enhancing mobility for wheeled robots in uneven terrains, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing hybrid robot concepts.
The paper tackled the problem of enabling a wheeled robot with a prismatic extension joint to perform dynamic motions like jumping over obstacles and self-righting after losing balance, by developing a template model and model predictive controller, and demonstrated these capabilities in simulation.
In this paper, we study a wheeled robot with a prismatic extension joint. This allows the robot to build up momentum to perform jumps over obstacles and to swing up to the upright position after the loss of balance. We propose a template model for the class of such two-wheeled jumping robots. This model can be considered as the simplest wheeled-legged system. We provide an analytical derivation of the system dynamics which we use inside a model predictive controller (MPC). We study the behavior of the model and demonstrate highly dynamic motions such as swing-up and jumping. Furthermore, these motions are discovered through optimization from first principles. We evaluate the controller on a variety of tasks and uneven terrains in a simulator.