Unilateral Ground Contact Force Regulations in Thruster-Assisted Legged Locomotion
This addresses computational efficiency in controlling bipedal robots for robotics applications, but appears incremental as it builds on existing Reference Governor methods with thruster assistance.
The paper tackles the problem of enforcing ground contact force constraints in thruster-assisted legged locomotion by using Reference Governors to manipulate joint trajectories, achieving faster computation compared to optimization-based methods while maintaining stability with thrusters.
In this paper, we study the regulation of the Ground Contact Forces (GRF) in thruster-assisted legged locomotion. We will employ Reference Governors (RGs) for enforcing GRF constraints in Harpy model which is a bipedal robot that is being developed at Northeastern University. Optimization-based methods and whole body control are widely used for enforcing the no-slip constraints in legged locomotion which can be very computationally expensive. In contrast, RGs can enforce these constraints by manipulating joint reference trajectories using Lyapunov stability arguments which can be computed much faster. The addition of the thrusters in our model allows to manipulate the gait parameters and the GRF without sacrificing the locomotion stability.