Capture Point Control in Thruster-Assisted Bipedal Locomotion

Kavli Affiliate: Morteza Gharib

| First 5 Authors: Shreyansh Pitroda, Aditya Bondada, Kaushik Venkatesh Krishnamurthy, Adarsh Salagame, Chenghao Wang

| Summary:

Despite major advancements in control design that are robust to unplanned
disturbances, bipedal robots are still susceptible to falling over and struggle
to negotiate rough terrains. By utilizing thrusters in our bipedal robot, we
can perform additional posture manipulation and expand the modes of locomotion
to enhance the robot’s stability and ability to negotiate rough and
difficult-to-navigate terrains. In this paper, we present our efforts in
designing a controller based on capture point control for our thruster-assisted
walking model named Harpy and explore its control design possibilities. While
capture point control based on centroidal models for bipedal systems has been
extensively studied, the incorporation of external forces that can influence
the dynamics of linear inverted pendulum models, often used in capture
point-based works, has not been explored before. The inclusion of these
external forces can lead to interesting interpretations of locomotion, such as
virtual buoyancy studied in aquatic-legged locomotion. This paper outlines the
dynamical model of our robot, the capture point method we use to assist the
upper body stabilization, and the simulation work done to show the controller’s
feasibility.

| Search Query: ArXiv Query: search_query=au:”Morteza Gharib”&id_list=&start=0&max_results=3

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