Motion planning of legged vehicles in an unstructured environment

Author

Eldershaw, Craig ; Yim, Mark

Author_Institution

Comput. Lab., Oxford Univ., UK

Volume

4

fYear

2001

fDate

2001

Firstpage

3383

Abstract

A planner for statically-stable motion of a legged robotic vehicle over an uneven terrain is presented that can plan the footplacement of individual legs for highly cluttered terrain. A method for determining the traversability over a generic discretised height map terrain is presented. Planning is broken into two levels of refinement to reduce the overall complexity and incorporates a number of heuristics. The planner has successfully planned the motion of 6 and 8 legged configurations of the XEROX PARC PolyBot modular reconfigurable robot as well as the CMU Ambler in simulation over arbitrarily complex terrain. A distributed implementation of the planner has also been shown on PolyBot´s distributed computational platform.

Keywords

distributed processing; legged locomotion; path planning; search problems; CMU Ambler; XEROX PARC PolyBot modular reconfigurable robot; complexity reduction; distributed computational platform; footplacement; heuristics; legged vehicles; motion planning; statically-stable motion; traversability; uneven terrain; unstructured environment; Computational modeling; Distributed computing; Foot; Leg; Legged locomotion; Motion planning; Robots; Sea surface; Surface finishing; Vehicles;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Robotics and Automation, 2001. Proceedings 2001 ICRA. IEEE International Conference on

ISSN

1050-4729

Print_ISBN

0-7803-6576-3

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ROBOT.2001.933140

Filename

933140