Dynamic Walking of Bipedal Robots on Uneven Stepping Stones via Adaptive-Frequency MPC

This letter presents a novel Adaptive-frequency MPC framework for bipedal locomotion over terrain with uneven stepping stones. In detail, we intend to achieve adaptive gait periods with variable MPC frequency for bipedal periodic walking gait to traverse terrain with discontinuities without slowing down. We pair this adaptive-frequency MPC with kino-dynamics trajectory optimization to obtain MPC adaptive frequencies (in terms of sampling times), center of mass (CoM) trajectory, and foot placements. We use whole-body control (WBC) along with adaptive-frequency MPC to track the optimal trajectories from offline optimization. In numerical validations, our adaptive-frequency optimization and MPC framework have shown advantages over fixed-frequency MPC. The proposed framework can control the bipedal robot to traverse through uneven stepping stone terrains with perturbed stone heights, widths, and surface shapes while maintaining an average speed of 1.5 m/s.