AGILITY: Dynamic Full Body Locomotion and Manipulation with Autonomous Legged Robots

Abstract

This paper presents the vision of the recently launched project AGILITY that aims to join forces across Europe to bring robots with legs and arms into highly unstructured outdoor environment such as a disaster area. Building upon state of the art torque controllable quadrupedal robots, we jointly investigate environment perception, motion planning, and whole body control strategies that enable rough terrain locomotion and manipulation. The developed machines will be able to autonomously navigate through challenging ground by optimally adapting the contact forces to the ground (e.g., propping feet against an obstacle), by using whole body motions to extend their standard workspace (e.g., twisting the body to reach), or by dynamic maneuvers (e.g., jumping or leaping). The proposed methods will be evaluated in a rescue scenario using (future versions of) our torque controllable quadrupedal robots HyQ and StarlETH.