MPC-Based Reference Governor Control for Self-Righting of Quadruped Robots: Preliminary Results

Abstract

Even with the current efficient legged robots' control techniques, unexpected situations may occur, leading the system to a fall. For the robot to recover mobility, it must be capable of autonomously repositioning itself. The named Self-Righting task aims to solve the problem of robot mobility recovery with a set of reference poses. This work proposes using a Reference Governor Control (RGC) for a quadrupedal robot's stand-up sub-task in a closed-loop scheme. The RGC is composed of a predictive controller based on the robot's states and the constraints' forces obtained from its interaction with the environment. From the results, it is possible to observe that the proposed solution can reposition the robot to a fully recovered mobility state.