Underactuated Motion Planning and Control for Jumping With Wheeled-Bipedal Robots

This letter studies jumping for wheeled-bipedal robots, a motion that takes full advantage of the benefits from hybrid wheeled and legged design features. A comprehensive hierarchical scheme planning control with robots is developed. Underactuation dynamics main difficulty to be addressed, especially in problem. To tackle this issue, novel wheeled-spring-loaded inverted pendulum (W-SLIP) model proposed characterize essential during jumping. Relying on differential-flatness-like property W-SLIP model, tractable quadratic programming based solution devised motions robots. Combined kinematic accounting flight phase motion, complete enable accurate tracking planned trajectories, linear regulator wheel controller task-space whole-body other joints are blended through disturbance observers. The overall validated using V-REP simulations prototype robot.