Towards dynamic narrow path walking on NU's Husky

Abstract

This research focuses on enabling Northeastern University's Husky, a multi-modal quadr-upedal robot, to navigate narrow paths akin to various animals in nature. The Husky is equipped with thrusters to stabilize its body during dynamic maneuvers, addressing challenges inherent in aerial-legged systems. The approach involves modeling the robot as HROM (Husky Reduced Model) and creating an optimal control framework using linearized dynamics for narrow path walking. The thesis introduces a gait scheduling method to generate an open-loop walking gait and validates these gaits through a high-fidelity Simscape simulation. Experimental results of the open-loop walking are presented, accompanied by potential directions for advancing this robotic system.--Author's abstract