Bio-inspired Thrust-Assisted Trotting on a legged-Aerial Robot via Real-Time QP-MPC

Key points

• This is inspired by wing-assisted locomotion observed in birds such as the chukar partridge, which employ thrust vectoring to manipulate the ground reaction force.1
• The proposed controller formulates the thruster-assisted spring-loaded inverted pendulum dynamics as a condensed QP-based model predictive control problem, enabling simultaneous regulation of ground contact force and active thrust vectoring at 500 Hz.1
• A decoupled control architecture is used, where the robot's sagittal dynamics are controlled using QP-MPC while the frontal dynamics is regulated using a cascade orientation stabilization controller.1
• The QP-MPC problem is consistently solved with 0.18ms, which is well within the 2ms computation budget while satisfying the GRF friction cone constraint.1

Sources (1)

• [1]Bio-inspired Thrust-Assisted Trotting on a legged-Aerial Robot via Real-Time QP-MPC
  arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 19, 05:50 PM

  This paper presents the hardware implementation of a quadratic program-based controller on Harpy: thruster-assisted bipedal robot to perform thruster-assisted trotting.

  This is inspired by wing-assisted locomotion observed in birds such as the chukar partridge, which employ thrust vectoring to manipulate the ground reaction force.

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