Position Control and Variable-Height Trajectory Tracking of a Soft Pneumatic Legged Robot

TL;DR

This paper presents a closed-loop control scheme for a soft pneumatic legged robot, enabling precise body height and orientation control, and trajectory tracking over flat terrain, advancing autonomous navigation capabilities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel closed-loop trajectory tracking control system for soft pneumatic legged robots, utilizing pneumatic feedback and geometric modeling for accurate movement.

Findings

Robot can precisely control body height and orientation.

Successfully tracks straight, curved, and variable-height trajectories.

Demonstrates potential for autonomous navigation in unstructured terrains.

Abstract

Soft pneumatic legged robots show promise in their ability to traverse a range of different types of terrain, including natural unstructured terrain met in applications like precision agriculture. They can adapt their body morphology to the intricacies of the terrain at hand, thus enabling robust and resilient locomotion. In this paper we capitalize upon recent developments on soft pneumatic legged robots to introduce a closed-loop trajectory tracking control scheme for operation over flat ground. Closed-loop pneumatic actuation feedback is achieved via a compact and portable pneumatic regulation board. Experimental results reveal that our soft legged robot can precisely control its body height and orientation while in quasi-static operation based on a geometric model. The robot can track both straight line and curved trajectories as well as variable-height trajectories. This work lays the basis to enable autonomous navigation for soft legged robots.