Safety-Critical Centralized Nonlinear MPC for Cooperative Payload Transportation by Two Quadrupedal Robots

TL;DR

This paper introduces a safety-critical nonlinear MPC framework for cooperative payload transport by two quadrupedal robots, ensuring collision avoidance and robustness in complex environments.

Contribution

It develops a novel CBF-based NMPC formulation that models the coupled robot-payload dynamics as a DAE-constrained problem for real-time safety.

Findings

Validated on hardware with two quadrupedal robots in cluttered environments.

Demonstrated robustness to mass, inertia uncertainties, and external disturbances.

Achieved real-time implementation with efficient control computation.

Abstract

This paper presents a safety-critical centralized nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) framework for cooperative payload transportation by two quadrupedal robots. The interconnected robot-payload system is modeled as a discrete-time nonlinear differential-algebraic system, capturing the coupled dynamics through holonomic constraints and interaction wrenches. To ensure safety in complex environments, we develop a control barrier function (CBF)-based NMPC formulation that enforces collision avoidance constraints for both the robots and the payload. The proposed approach retains the interaction wrenches as decision variables, resulting in a structured DAE-constrained optimal control problem that enables efficient real-time implementation. The effectiveness of the algorithm is validated through extensive hardware experiments on two Unitree Go2 platforms performing cooperative payload transportation in cluttered environments under mass and inertia uncertainty and external push disturbances.