A walk supervisor architecture for autonomous four-legged robots embedding real-time decision-making

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of walk control for legged robots, especially quadrupeds. The control is intended at locomotion level, i.e. at a rather low level in the overall control structure of the robot. The architecture of the corresponding walk supervisor is designed in view of being as versatile as possible, however the paper concerns more specifically the situations in which a dynamic control with fast adaptation to terrain irregularities is needed. The proposed architecture makes use of conventional closed-loop control, whose operation is supervised by a real-time reasoning system, implemented as a compiled rule-based module.