Kinodynamic Motion Planning for Multi-Legged Robot Jumping via Mixed-Integer Convex Program
This addresses the problem of enabling multi-legged robots to perform complex, dynamic jumps for traversal in difficult environments, representing a domain-specific advancement in robotics.
The paper tackled the problem of planning dynamic jumping motions for multi-legged robots by developing a kinodynamic motion planning framework based on mixed-integer convex programming (MICP), which simultaneously optimizes centroidal motion, contact points, wrench, and gait sequences, and demonstrated that the method generates novel and dexterous maneuvers deployable on a two-legged robot for challenging terrains.
This paper proposes a kinodynamic motion planning framework for multi-legged robot jumping based on the mixed-integer convex program (MICP), which simultaneously reasons about centroidal motion, contact points, wrench, and gait sequences. This method uniquely combines configuration space discretization and the construction of feasible wrench polytope (FWP) to encode kinematic constraints, actuator limit, friction cone constraint, and gait sequencing into a single MICP. The MICP could be efficiently solved to the global optimum by off-the-shelf numerical solvers and provide highly dynamic jumping motions without requiring initial guesses. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method could find novel and dexterous maneuvers that are directly deployable on the two-legged robot platform to traverse through challenging terrains.