Locomotion planning for quadruped robot over rough terrain

Abstract

In this paper, we present a general quadruped locomotion planning method for traversing unstructured terrain. Novel features of our method include the procedure that a body trajectory optimizer based on the Zero Moment Point (ZMP) stability criterion and Linear Inverted Pendulum Model (LIPM). The ZMP trajectory optimizer can be applied to any legged robot which can be approximated by the LIPM model. The main benefits of the framework that we used are that it is highly modular, that it allows the various parameters to be tuned in an intuitive way, and that it results in few center of gravity (COG) fluctuation.