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IROS 2020 | Online Dynamic Motion Planning and Control for Wheeled Biped Robots
We are going to introduce these papers during the time of IROS 2020. Below is the article Online Dynamic Motion Planning and Control for Wheeled Biped Robots, the corresponding author of this paper is Professor Sethu Vijayakumar. Professor Sethu Vijayakumar directs one of our International Collaboration Joint Project titled [Mobile Collaborative Robots: Addressing Real World Challenges] setup between the University of Edinburgh and AIRS, with Professor Tin Lun Lam.
Research Background
Wheeled-legged robots combine the efficiency of wheeled robots when driving on suitably flat surfaces and versatility of legged robots when stepping over or around obstacles. Several platforms with such as Wheeled-ANYmal, ASCENTO, Handle has demonstrated great potential in real world scenarios.
Abstract
Wheeled-legged robots combine the efficiency of wheeled robots when driving on suitably flat surfaces and versatility of legged robots when stepping over or around obstacles. This paper introduces a planning and control framework to realise dynamic locomotion for wheeled biped robots. We propose the Cart-Linear Inverted Pendulum Model (Cart-LIPM) as a template model for the rolling motion and the under-actuated LIPM for contact changes while walking. The generated motion is then tracked by an inverse dynamic whole-body controller which coordinates all joints, including the wheels. The framework has a hierarchical structure and is implemented in a model predictive control (MPC) fashion. To validate the proposed approach for hybrid motion generation, two scenarios involving different types of obstacles are designed in simulation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that such online dynamic hybrid locomotion has been demonstrated on wheeled biped robots.
Authors
The first author of this paper is Songyan Xin, who is currently a post doc of UoE in UK and he is the strand leader of “Multi-Contact Planning and Control” of the international joint research project between AIRS and UoE. His research interests lie in applying control, optimization and machine learning algorithms on legged robots to generate dynamic movements. Before joining the university of Edinburgh, he got his PhD in Bioengineering and Robotics from Italian Institute of Technology and the University of Genoa under the supervision of Dr. Nikolaos Tsagarakis.
The corresponding author of this paper is Professor Sethu Vijayakumar. Professor Vijayakumar is Professor of Robotics at the University of Edinburgh and an Adjunct Faculty of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, the Co-Programme Director of the Alan Turing Institute and a visiting Research Scientist at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Labs, Kyoto-Japan. His research interest spans a broad interdisciplinary curriculum involving basic research in the fields of robotics, statistical machine learning, motor control, planning and optimization in autonomous systems and computational neuroscience. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Professor Sethu Vijayakumar directs one of our International Collaboration Joint Project titled [Mobile Collaborative Robots: Addressing Real World Challenges] setup between the University of Edinburgh and AIRS, with Professor Tin Lun Lam. Professor Lam is faculty at CUHK-SZ and is the director of Research Center on Intelligent Robots of AIRS. The project aims to make fundamental and applied advances in the field of artificial intelligence and robotics, with current research focus in the areas of perception, motion planning and control in the field of high dimensional robotics system and HRI.
Acknowledgement
This research is supported by the EPSRC UK RAI Hub in Future AI and Robotics for Space (FAIR-SPACE, project ID:EP/R026092/1), the EU H2020 project Memory of Motion (MEMMO, ID: 780684) and funding from Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society (2019-ICP002). The authors would like to thank Traiko Dinev, Vladimir Ivan, Matt Timmons-Brown and Daniel Gordon for feedback on the manuscript.
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Online Dynamic Motion Planning and Control for Wheeled Biped Robots
