Sequential Motion Planning for Bipedal Somersault via Flywheel SLIP and Momentum Transmission with Task Space Control
This addresses the challenge of dynamic acrobatic maneuvers for bipedal robots, representing an incremental advance in motion planning.
The paper tackles the problem of generating somersault motions on bipedal robots by coupling hopping and rotational motions, achieving successful simulation of multiple somersaults on a modified Cassie robot.
In this paper, we present a sequential motion planning and control method for generating somersaults on bipedal robots. The somersault (backflip or frontflip) is considered as a coupling between an axile hopping motion and a rotational motion about the center of mass of the robot; these are encoded by a hopping Spring-loaded Inverted Pendulum (SLIP) model and the rotation of a Flywheel, respectively. We thus present the Flywheel SLIP model for generating the desired motion on the ground phase. In the flight phase, we present a momentum transmission method to adjust the orientation of the lower body based on the conservation of the centroidal momentum. The generated motion plans are realized on the full-dimensional robot via momentum-included task space control. Finally, the proposed method is implemented on a modified version of the bipedal robot Cassie in simulation wherein multiple somersault motions are generated.