Position Control and Variable-Height Trajectory Tracking of a Soft Pneumatic Legged Robot
This work addresses autonomous navigation for soft legged robots, but it is incremental as it builds on existing developments for flat ground control.
The paper tackled the problem of controlling a soft pneumatic legged robot for precise trajectory tracking on flat ground, achieving the ability to track straight, curved, and variable-height trajectories based on a geometric model.
Soft pneumatic legged robots show promise in their ability to traverse a range of different types of terrain, including natural unstructured terrain met in applications like precision agriculture. They can adapt their body morphology to the intricacies of the terrain at hand, thus enabling robust and resilient locomotion. In this paper we capitalize upon recent developments on soft pneumatic legged robots to introduce a closed-loop trajectory tracking control scheme for operation over flat ground. Closed-loop pneumatic actuation feedback is achieved via a compact and portable pneumatic regulation board. Experimental results reveal that our soft legged robot can precisely control its body height and orientation while in quasi-static operation based on a geometric model. The robot can track both straight line and curved trajectories as well as variable-height trajectories. This work lays the basis to enable autonomous navigation for soft legged robots.