Online Locomotion Planner For Wheeled Quadrupedal Robot Using Deviation Based Scheduler

Abstract

Wheel-legged robots have the potential of highly dynamic locomotion. The development of Wheel-legged robots might extend the capabilities and provide a solution to the challenges of legged robots. We first modeled our self-developed quadruped experimental platform and expanded our previous work. For the scene of long-range and high-speed movement, we propose a deviation-based online locomotion planner to improve the efficiency and stability of a wheeled quadrupedal robot by reducing unnecessary steps. In the process, relative deviation values are obtained by comparing the ideal foothold reference with the actual wheel position and used to generate locomotion commands. With a control framework of robot locomotion based on a whole-body controller, the robot can move stably for a long distance in the simulation environment. The simulation results also show that compared with the time-based scheduler, this approach has advantages in efficiency and stability.