Path planning and reference tracking for a 18DoF quadruped robot

Quadruped robots and many other types of legged robots have been gaining popularity in recent years due to their advantages over wheeled robots. Firstly, quadruped robots have excellent mobility and stability. With four legs, the quadruped robots can move more efficiently over rough terrain and uneven surfaces, making them a prime candidate for use in disaster response situations, search and rescue operations and exploration missions. Furthermore, quadruped robots don’t have holonomic constraints, thus making them more maneuverable than any other type of robots. This makes them ideal for use in confined spaces. The problem of quadruped control can be divided in low level and high level control, the former concerning each joint angle position, velocity, acceleration and torque to achieve a desired motion for each leg, while the latter is concerned with the required whole-body linear and angular velocities to follow a specified trajectory. In this paper we present a high level control strategy using Dynamic Window Approach (DWA) and a modified dynamic model for the quadruped’s whole-body dynamics. Furthermore, we study the effects of modified mass-inertia matrix on the overall performance of the algorithm. We conduct our experiments in a proprietary simulated environment and in real world.