Time-projection control to recover inter-sample disturbances, application to bipedal walking control

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel bipedal walking controller that uses time projection to quickly recover from disturbances, outperforming traditional controllers in speed and stability, with applications demonstrated on a 3LP model.

Contribution

The paper proposes a time-projection control method for bipedal walking that reacts instantly to disturbances, offering faster and more stable recovery compared to existing methods.

Findings

Superior disturbance recovery performance

Faster computation than MPC-based controllers

Strong stabilization and large viable state regions

Abstract

We present a new walking controller based on 3LP, a 3D model of bipedal walking that is composed of three pendulums to simulate falling, swing and torso dynamics. Taking advantage of linear equations and closed-form solutions of 3LP, the proposed controller projects intermediate states of the biped back to the beginning of the phase for which a discrete LQR controller is designed. After the projection, a proper control policy is generated by this LQR controller and used at the intermediate time. The projection controller reacts to disturbances immediately and compared to the discrete LQR controller, it provides superior performance in recovering intermittent external pushes. Further analysis of closed-loop eigenvalues and disturbance rejection strength show strong stabilization properties for this architecture. An analysis of viable regions also show that the proposed controller covers most of the maximal viable set of states. It is computationally much faster than Model Predictive Controllers (MPC) and yet optimal over an infinite horizon.