Motion planning of legged vehicles in an unstructured environment

Abstract

A planner for statically-stable motion of a legged robotic vehicle over an uneven terrain is presented that can plan the footplacement of individual legs for highly cluttered terrain. A method for determining the traversability over a generic discretised height map terrain is presented. Planning is broken into two levels of refinement to reduce the overall complexity and incorporates a number of heuristics. The planner has successfully planned the motion of 6 and 8 legged configurations of the XEROX PARC PolyBot modular reconfigurable robot as well as the CMU Ambler in simulation over arbitrarily complex terrain. A distributed implementation of the planner has also been shown on PolyBot's distributed computational platform.