Task-oriented Hierarchical Control for a Quadruped Robot

Abstract

This study aims to build a standard framework that can be applied to accomplish different tasks for a quadruped robot. To achieve this goal, a task-oriented hierarchical control framework is proposed. The framework is composed of four layers, including the task, action, movement, and joint layer, where the action layer plays a crucial role. An action is defined as a group of movements that take the robot from an initial position/orientation to another position/orientation. All actions form the action library, which can be combined to accomplish different tasks. Based on the hierarchical control framework, two tasks including path following and ditch crossing are achieved in this paper. The advantages of the proposed hierarchical control framework are its universality and extendibility since it can be easily applied to other tasks by enriching the action library. Simulation results in V-REP are given to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.