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Toward Legless Locomotion Control
R. Balasubramanian, A. Rizzi, and M. Mason
2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, October, 2006, pp. 5594 - 5599.

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Motivated by an error-recovery locomotion problem, we propose a control technique for a complex mechanical system by decomposing the system dynamics into a collection of simplified models. The robot considered, The Rocking and Rolling Robot (RRRobot), is a high-centered round-bodied robot that locomotes on a plane by swinging its legs and rocking on its shell. We identify the elements contributing to locomotion through two steps: 1) decoupling the leg-body rotation dynamics from the body-plane contact kinematics, and 2) decoupling the body rotational dynamics into dynamics along each rotational axis. We show, using simulation, that such decoupling provides a good approximation to RRRobot's locomotion and use these models to find an approximate control solution for RRRobot: a mapping between planar translation and leg motions.

Associated lab/group: Manipulation Lab
Associated project: Legless Locomotion

Number of pages: 6

R. Balasubramanian, A. Rizzi, and M. Mason, "Toward Legless Locomotion Control," 2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, October, 2006, pp. 5594 - 5599.

@inproceedings{Balasubramanian_2006_5614,
   author = "Ravi Balasubramanian and Alfred Rizzi and Matthew Mason",
   title = "Toward Legless Locomotion Control",
   booktitle = "2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems",
   month = "October",
   year = "2006",
   pages = "5594 - 5599"
}