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!


Supplementary Video


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}
}


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.)