Motion Planning Using an Impact-Based Hybrid Control for Trajectory Generation in Adaptive Walking

Abstract

This paper aims to solve a major drawback of walking robots i.e. their inability to react to environmental disturbances while navigating in natural rough terrains. This problem is reduced here by suggesting the use of a hybrid force‐position control based trajectory generation with the impact dynamics into consideration that compensates for the stability variations, thus helping the robot react stably in the face of environmental disturbances. As a consequence, the proposed impact‐based hybrid control helps the robot achieve better and stable motion planning than conventional position‐based control algorithms. Dynamic simulations and real world outdoor experiments performed on a six legged hexapod robot show a relevant improvement in the robot locomotion.