Quadruped’s Efficient Walking on Challenging Terrains with Perception and Whole-Body Control

One of the dominant destinies of legged robots is to traverse challenging terrains. In this paper, we present a control framework for a quadrupedal robot walking over discontinuous but flat terrains. Firstly, we analyze the kinematic characteristic of the leg and give the 3-D torque distribution. Secondly, we proposed the center of gravity (CoG) trajectory planner and foothold planner based on the map information and torque distribution. Additionally, a whole-body controller is utilized to achieve model-based compliant control. Simulation results based on the quadruped Solo-12 demonstrate that our method works well when walking over arrays of cylinders.