MPC-based Tilting and Forward Motion Control of Quadruped Robots

Abstract

In many practical implementations, a quadruped robot needs to safely pass long and narrow space. This paper investigates the tilting and forward motion control problem for a quadruped robot to pass narrow space. We develop a model predictive control (MPC)-based control method for the tilting and forward motion control. In particular, we firstly establish a quadruped robot floating centrifugal motion model, based on which we design objective functions and constraints in MPC to generate command forces for robots' feet. In addition, we design the gaits and reference trajectory of the roll angle to achieve tilting switching and forward movement. The effectiveness of the designed MPC algorithm is verified via the simulation platform and hardware experiments. Finally, we discover the feasible range of roll angle maintaining stable tilting and forward movement via simulation experiments.