Jump Planning and Airborne Attitude Control of Bipedal Wheel-Legged Robots

This letter investigates the jumping mechanism of a bipedal wheel-legged robot, proposing a comprehensive trajectory planning and control system that successfully achieves jumps of varying heights while significantly improving stability and reliability. Given the underactuated, non-linear and transient dynamics inherent in the jumping process, precisely controlling the jump height while ensuring stability is a challenging task. To address this, a trajectory planning method is introduced to achieve target jump heights, complemented by an impedance controller for trajectory tracking and a jump state observer for accurate stage identification. To mitigate the issue of aerial attitude divergence, a novel airborne dynamics model is proposed to characterize the robot's fundamental aerial dynamics, enabling effective airborne attitude control and ensuring high stability during the jump. Both simulations and prototype experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.