Towards Legged Locomotion on Steep Planetary Terrain
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Author / Producer
Date
2023
Publication Type
Conference Paper
ETH Bibliography
yes
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Abstract
Scientific exploration of planetary bodies is an
activity well-suited for robots. Unfortunately, the regions that
are richer in potential discoveries, such as impact craters, caves,
and volcanic terraces, are hard to access with wheeled robots.
Recent advances in legged-based approaches have shown the
potential of the technology to overcome difficult terrains such as
slopes and slippery surfaces. In this work, we focus on locomo-
tion for sandy slopes, comparing standard walking policies with
a novel crawling-based gait for quadrupedal robots. We fine-
tuned a state-of-the-art locomotion framework and introduced
hardware modifications to the robot ANYmal, which enables
walking on its knees. Moreover, we integrated a novel metric
for stability, the stability margin, in the training process to
increase robustness in such conditions. We benchmarked the
locomotion policies in simulation and in real-world experiments
on a martian soil simulant. Our results show a significant
improvement in terms of robustness and stability, especially
at higher slope angles beyond 15 degrees.
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Publication status
published
Editor
Book title
2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Journal / series
Volume
Pages / Article No.
786 - 792
Publisher
IEEE
Event
36th IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2023)
Edition / version
Methods
Software
Geographic location
Date collected
Date created
Subject
ROBOTICS; ROBOT CONTROL; Design; Space robotics
Organisational unit
09570 - Hutter, Marco / Hutter, Marco
02620 - Inst. f. Robotik u. Intelligente Systeme / Inst. Robotics and Intelligent Systems