4. Underbrush Controller for Walking Through Entanglements

Underbrush Controller

Overview

Entanglements like vines and branches in natural settings or cords and pipes in human spaces prevent mobile robots from accessing many environments. Legged robots should be effective in these settings, and more so than wheeled or tracked platforms, but naive controllers quickly become entangled and stuck. In this paper we present a method for proprioception aimed specifically at the task of sensing entanglements of a robot’s legs as well as a reaction strategy to disentangle legs during their swing phase as they advance to their next foothold. We demonstrate our proprioception and reaction strategy enables traversal of entanglements of many stiffnesses and geometries succeeding in 14 out of 16 trials in laboratory tests, as well as a natural outdoor environment.

Publication

If you use this work in an academic context, please cite the following publications as relevant:

• Underbrush Controller: J. K. Yim, J. Ren, D. Ologan, S. G. Gonzalez, and A. M. Johnson, “Proprioception and reaction for walking among entanglements,” in IEEE/RSJ international conference on intelligent robots and systems (IROS), 2023. (paper)

• Repository: J. Norby, Y. Yang, A. Tajbakhsh, J. Ren, J. K. Yim, A. Stutt, Q. Yu, N. Flowers, and A. M. Johnson. Quad- SDK: Full stack software framework for agile quadrupedal locomotion. In ICRA Workshop on Legged Robots, May 2022. (paper)

    @inproceedings{abs:norby-quad-sdk-2022,
      author        = {Joseph Norby and Yanhao Yang and Ardalan Tajbakhsh and Jiming Ren and Justin K. Yim and Alexandra Stutt and Qishun Yu and Nikolai Flowers and Aaron M. Johnson},
      title         = {Quad-{SDK}: Full Stack Software Framework for Agile Quadrupedal Locomotion},
      booktitle     = {ICRA Workshop on Legged Robots},
      year          = {2022},
      month         = {May},
      type          = {workshop abstract},
      url_Info      = {https://leggedrobots.org/index.html},
      url_PDF       = {http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/amj1/papers/Quad_SDK_ICRA_Abstract.pdf},
      keywords      = {Control,Planning,Leaping}
    }
  

Usage

git checkout devel
roslaunch quad_utils underbrush_gazebo.launch
rostopic pub /robot_1/control/mode std_msgs/UInt8 "data:1"
roslaunch quad_utils quad_plan.launch reference:=twist logging:=true
rosrun body_force_estimator path_following.py

Underbrush.mp4