Design of a Jumping Control Framework with Heuristic Landing for Bipedal Robots

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel control framework for bipedal robots that enhances jumping capabilities by using a heuristic landing planner during flight to reduce impact and improve robustness, validated through simulations and hardware tests.

Contribution

It introduces the first flight-phase-based heuristic landing approach integrated with a comprehensive motion planner and control hierarchy for bipedal jumping.

Findings

Successful implementation on a miniature bipedal robot

Achieved diverse jumping maneuvers including somersaults

Demonstrated robustness and efficiency in hardware experiments

Abstract

Generating dynamic jumping motions on legged robots remains a challenging control problem as the full flight phase and large landing impact are expected. Compared to quadrupedal robots or other multi-legged robots, bipedal robots place higher requirements for the control strategy given a much smaller footprint. To solve this problem, a novel heuristic landing planner is proposed in this paper. With the momentum feedback during the flight phase, landing locations can be updated to minimize the influence of uncertainties from tracking errors or external disturbances when landing. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to take advantage of the flight phase to reduce the impact of the jump landing which is implemented in the actual robot. By integrating it with a modified kino-dynamics motion planner with centroidal momentum and a low-level controller which explores the whole-body dynamics to hierarchically handle multiple tasks, a complete and versatile jumping control framework is designed in this paper. Extensive results of simulation and hardware jumping experiments on a miniature bipedal robot with proprioceptive actuation are provided to demonstrate that the proposed framework is able to achieve human-like efficient and robust jumping tasks, including directional jump, twisting jump, step jump, and somersaults.