Animal Gaits on Quadrupedal Robots Using Motion Matching and Model-Based Control

2021 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2021)

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the challenge of generating animal-like walking motions for legged robots. To this end, we propose a versatile and robust control pipeline that combines a state-of-the-art model-based controller with a data-driven technique that is commonly used in computer animation. We demonstrate the efficacy of our control framework on a variety of quadrupedal robots in simulation. We show, in particular, that our approach can automatically reproduce key characteristics of animal motions, including speed-specific gaits, unscripted footfall patterns for nonperiodic motions, and natural small variations in overall body movements.

Paper: [IEEE Xplore]   Open access: [ETH Research Collection]

News: our supplementary video of "Animal Gaits on Quadrupedal Robots Using Motion Matching and Model Based Control" has been selected for IEEE Spectrum Video Friday collection on August 06th 2021!

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Supplementary Video

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Bibtex

@inproceedings{kang2021animal,
  title={Animal Gaits on Quadrupedal Robots Using Motion Matching and Model-Based Control},
  author={Kang, Dongho and Zimmermann, Simon and Coros, Stelian},
  booktitle={2021 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
  pages={8500--8507},
  year={2021},
  organization={IEEE},
  doi={10.1109/IROS51168.2021.9635838}
}

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Acknowledgment

This work has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 866480.)