LAURON VI: A Six-Legged Robot for Dynamic Walking

TL;DR

LAURON VI is a versatile six-legged robot designed for dynamic walking and autonomous complex missions, featuring advanced control strategies and fast locomotion capabilities to enhance real-world application potential.

Contribution

The paper introduces LAURON VI, a new six-legged robot platform with innovative control approaches and fast gait strategies for improved terrain adaptability and autonomy.

Findings

Compared three control methods: kinematic, model-predictive, reinforcement learning.

Successfully tested in lab and Mars analog environments.

Fast locomotion strategies significantly enhance application scope.

Abstract

Legged locomotion enables robotic systems to traverse extremely challenging terrains. In many real-world scenarios, the terrain is not that difficult and these mixed terrain types introduce the need for flexible use of different walking strategies to achieve mission goals in a fast, reliable, and energy-efficient way. Six-legged robots have a high degree of flexibility and inherent stability that aids them in traversing even some of the most difficult terrains, such as collapsed buildings. However, their lack of fast walking gaits for easier surfaces is one reason why they are not commonly applied in these scenarios. This work presents LAURON VI, a six-legged robot platform for research on dynamic walking gaits as well as on autonomy for complex field missions. The robot's 18 series elastic joint actuators offer high-frequency interfaces for Cartesian impedance and pure torque control. We have designed, implemented, and compared three control approaches: kinematic-based, model-predictive, and reinforcement-learned controllers. The robot hardware and the different control approaches were extensively tested in a lab environment as well as on a Mars analog mission. The introduction of fast locomotion strategies for LAURON VI makes six-legged robots vastly more suitable for a wide range of real-world applications.