QR-SCAN: Traversable Region Scan for Quadruped Robot Exploration using Lightweight Precomputed Trajectory

Abstract

Exploring an unknown environment with unmanned robots has attracted many interests in the robotics field to replace human resources. Especially, quadruped robots, which can operate in challenging terrains and have high payload capacity, have been widely researched. However, quadruped robots are facing the contact constraints of the legs, namely traversability. In this paper, to explore unknown environments with quadruped robots safely, we propose a novel local exploration planner that utilizes the precomputed trajectories to check traversability and collision at the same time. By strictly checking the collision and traversability in two steps, the admissible path is guaranteed in the receding-horizon manner. In addition, the trajectory considers the kinodynamics and is lightweight thanks to its precomputation. The performance of the proposed method is verified by exploring 3D simulation environments in comparison with one of the state-of-the-art methods.