Autonomous Navigation for Quadrupedal Robots with Optimized Jumping through Constrained Obstacles

TL;DR

This paper introduces an autonomous quadrupedal navigation system that combines optimized jumping and walking, enabling the robot to traverse complex environments with obstacles up to 13 cm high by switching behaviors dynamically.

Contribution

It presents an end-to-end navigation framework integrating optimized jumping trajectories with walking, allowing quadrupedal robots to navigate through constrained environments more effectively.

Findings

Successfully navigated through obstacle environments with jumping over 13 cm height.

Demonstrated real-world deployment on a Mini Cheetah robot.

Enabled dynamic switching between walking and jumping modes.

Abstract

Quadrupeds are strong candidates for navigating challenging environments because of their agile and dynamic designs. This paper presents a methodology that extends the range of exploration for quadrupedal robots by creating an end-to-end navigation framework that exploits walking and jumping modes. To obtain a dynamic jumping maneuver while avoiding obstacles, dynamically-feasible trajectories are optimized offline through collocation-based optimization where safety constraints are imposed. Such optimization schematic allows the robot to jump through window-shaped obstacles by considering both obstacles in the air and on the ground. The resulted jumping mode is utilized in an autonomous navigation pipeline that leverages a search-based global planner and a local planner to enable the robot to reach the goal location by walking. A state machine together with a decision making strategy allows the system to switch behaviors between walking around obstacles or jumping through them. The proposed framework is experimentally deployed and validated on a quadrupedal robot, a Mini Cheetah, to enable the robot to autonomously navigate through an environment while avoiding obstacles and jumping over a maximum height of 13 cm to pass through a window-shaped opening in order to reach its goal.