Search-based Kinodynamic Motion Planning for Omnidirectional Quadruped Robots

TL;DR

This paper presents a kinodynamic motion planning system for omnidirectional quadruped robots that generates smooth, feasible paths considering the robot's dynamic constraints, improving navigation safety and efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a kinodynamic path finding and trajectory refinement approach tailored for omnidirectional quadruped robots, addressing limitations of traditional methods.

Findings

Successfully generates dynamically feasible paths in simulation and real-world tests.

Improves navigation safety by incorporating collision costs as soft constraints.

Demonstrates superior performance on the Jueying Mini quadruped robot.

Abstract

Autonomous navigation has played an increasingly significant role in quadruped robot system. However, most existing works on quadruped robots navigation using traditional search-based or sample-based methods do not consider the kinodynamic characteristics of quadruped robots, generating kinodynamically infeasible parts, that are difficult to track. In this paper, we introduce a complete navigation system considering the omnidirectional abilities of quadruped robots. First, we use kinodynamic path finding method to obtain smooth, dynamically feasible, time-optimal initial paths and add collision cost as a soft constraint to ensure safety. Then the trajectory is refined by the timed elastic band (TEB) method based on the omnidirectional model of quadruped robots. The superior performance of our work is demonstrated through simulating and real-world experiments on our quadruped robot Jueying Mini.