Real-time Optimal Landing Control of the MIT Mini Cheetah
This addresses the challenge of robust landing for legged robots, enabling recovery from falls in dynamic environments, though it is incremental relative to prior work.
The paper tackles the problem of real-time optimal landing control for quadrupedal robots without pre-specified contact schedules, achieving safe recovery from drops up to 8 m in simulation and 2 m on hardware.
Quadrupedal landing is a complex process involving large impacts, elaborate contact transitions, and is a crucial recovery behavior observed in many biological animals. This work presents a real-time, optimal landing controller that is free of pre-specified contact schedules. The controller determines optimal touchdown postures and reaction force profiles and is able to recover from a variety of falling configurations. The quadrupedal platform used, the MIT Mini Cheetah, recovered safely from drops of up to 8 m in simulation, as well as from a range of orientations and planar velocities. The controller is also tested on hardware, successfully recovering from drops of up to 2 m.