Motion Planning Using an Impact-Based Hybrid Control for Trajectory Generation in Adaptive Walking

This paper aims to solve a major drawback of walking robots i.e. their inability to react to environmental disturbances while navigating in natural rough terrains. This problem is reduced here by suggesting the use of a hybrid force-position control based trajectory generation with the impact dynamics into consideration that compensates for the stability variations, thus helping the robot react stably in the face of environmental disturbances. As a consequence, the proposed impact-based hybrid control helps the robot achieve better and stable motion planning than conventional position-based control algorithms. Dynamic simulations and real world outdoor experiments performed on a six legged hexapod robot show a relevant improvement in the robot locomotion.