Kinodynamic Motion Planning for Multi-Legged Robot Jumping via Mixed-Integer Convex Program

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel kinodynamic motion planning framework for multi-legged robot jumping using mixed-integer convex programming, enabling efficient, globally optimal, and highly dynamic jumping motions without initial guesses.

Contribution

It combines configuration space discretization and feasible wrench polytope construction within a single MICP to encode complex constraints for multi-legged robot jumping.

Findings

Successfully generates dynamic jumping motions in simulation.

Demonstrates real-world deployment on a two-legged robot platform.

Finds dexterous maneuvers for challenging terrain traversal.

Abstract

This paper proposes a kinodynamic motion planning framework for multi-legged robot jumping based on the mixed-integer convex program (MICP), which simultaneously reasons about centroidal motion, contact points, wrench, and gait sequences. This method uniquely combines configuration space discretization and the construction of feasible wrench polytope (FWP) to encode kinematic constraints, actuator limit, friction cone constraint, and gait sequencing into a single MICP. The MICP could be efficiently solved to the global optimum by off-the-shelf numerical solvers and provide highly dynamic jumping motions without requiring initial guesses. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method could find novel and dexterous maneuvers that are directly deployable on the two-legged robot platform to traverse through challenging terrains.