Safety-critical Locomotion of Biped Robots in Infeasible Paths: Overcoming Obstacles during Navigation toward Destination

TL;DR

This paper introduces a safety-critical locomotion control framework for biped robots navigating obstacle-rich environments, enabling safe and robust movement through infeasible paths without relying on traditional motion planning.

Contribution

The proposed framework uses a hierarchy of safety conditions and a hybrid pendulum model with disturbance observer to ensure safe navigation in complex, obstacle-filled terrains.

Findings

Successful safe navigation through infeasible paths

Robust bipedal locomotion with disturbance handling

Reduced reliance on motion planning methods

Abstract

This paper proposes a safety-critical locomotion control framework employed for legged robots exploring through infeasible path in obstacle-rich environments. Our research focus is on achieving safe and robust locomotion where robots confront unavoidable obstacles en route to their designated destination. Through the utilization of outcomes from physical interactions with unknown objects, we establish a hierarchy among the safety-critical conditions avoiding the obstacles. This hierarchy enables the generation of a safe reference trajectory that adeptly mitigates conflicts among safety conditions and reduce the risk while controlling the robot toward its destination without additional motion planning methods. In addition, robust bipedal locomotion is achieved by utilizing the Hybrid Linear Inverted Pendulum model, coupled with a disturbance observer addressing a disturbance from the physical interaction.