Continuous Stairs Climbing Control Design for Bipedal Robots

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Date

2024-05

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The Ohio State University

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Abstract

While robotics technology advances and more real-world applications are used in the industry, legged robots, unlike robotic arms or wheeled robots, are not widely utilized despite their various benefits, such as improved movement performance in complex terrains. This could be due to several limitations in both hardware and software. This paper focuses on developing a reliable and efficient control algorithm for bipedal robots walking on long, continuous stairs. This enhancement aims to increase their movability in real-world scenarios, fully utilizing their advantages of better operation and relatively less space requirement in complex terrain compared to traditional wheeled robots. To enable bipedal robots to walk on continuous stairs, the paper proposes improvements to the traditional Angular Momentum Linear Inverted Pendulum (ALIP) planner. These improvements enable the 2D planar five-link walker robot, RABBIT, to handle vertical and horizontal displacement of the center of mass (COM) and to calculate foot displacement as a trajectory in the simulator. The findings suggest that the modified traditional dynamical model for bipedal robots requires fewer resources to generate control algorithms. As the working environment, stairs, a reparative environment, this offers an advantage with utilizing Bezier approximation to regulate the swing-foot and COM displacement trajectory onto the bipedal model itself. This work highlights the advantage from model-based approach that it takes less time and inputs to generate the control algorithms and the transparency during the simulation comparing to the black box-like process of the learning-based approaches, but with an inherent limitation of lacking versatility. And for LIP model specifically, without introducing other policies or methodologies, it is insufficient to handle the vertical displacement of the COM for bipedal robots.

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Keywords

LIP, Bipedal robots, Motion planning, Stairs, Model-based

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