Proprioceptive control of an over-actuated hexapod robot in unstructured terrain

Bjelonic M, Kottege N, Beckerle P (2016)

Publication Type: Conference contribution

Publication year: 2016

Journal

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems IEEE

Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.

Book Volume: 2016-November

Pages Range: 2042-2049

Conference Proceedings Title: IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems

Event location: Daejeon KR

ISBN: 9781509037629

DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2016.7759321

Abstract

Legged robots such as hexapods have the potential to traverse unstructured terrain. This paper introduces a novel hexapod robot (Weaver) using a hierarchical controller, with the ability to efficiently traverse uneven and inclined terrain. The robot has five joints per leg and 30 degrees of freedom overall. The two redundant joints improve the locomotion of the robot by controlling the body pose and the leg orientation with respect to the ground. The impedance controller in Cartesian space reacts to unstructured terrain and thus achieves self-stabilizing behavior without prior profiling of the terrain through exteroceptive sensing. Instead of adding force sensors, the force at the foot tip is calculated by processing the current signals of the actuators. This work experimentally evaluates Weaver with the proposed controller and demonstrates that it can effectively traverse challenging terrains and high gradient slopes, reduce angular movements of the body by more than 55% and reduce the cost of transport (up to 50% on uneven terrain and by 85% on a slope with 20 °). The controller also enables Weaver to walk up inclines of up to 30 °, and remain statically stable on inclines up to 50 °. Furthermore, we present a new metric for legged robot stability performance along with a method for proprioceptive terrain characterization.

Authors with CRIS profile

Philipp Beckerle

Involved external institutions

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) AU Australia (AU) Technische Universität Darmstadt DE Germany (DE)

How to cite

APA:

Bjelonic, M., Kottege, N., & Beckerle, P. (2016). Proprioceptive control of an over-actuated hexapod robot in unstructured terrain. In IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (pp. 2042-2049). Daejeon, KR: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc..

MLA:

Bjelonic, Marko, Navinda Kottege, and Philipp Beckerle. "Proprioceptive control of an over-actuated hexapod robot in unstructured terrain." Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2016, Daejeon Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., 2016. 2042-2049.

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