The Stanford LittleDog: A learning and rapid replanning approach to quadruped locomotion

Legged robots offer the potential to navigate a wide variety of terrains that are inaccessible to wheeled vehicles. In this paper we consider the planning and control tasks of navigating a quadruped robot over a wide variety of challenging terrain, including terrain which it has not seen until run-time. We present a software architecture that makes use of both static and dynamic gaits, as well as specialized dynamic maneuvers, to accomplish this task. Throughout the paper we highlight two themes that have been central to our approach: 1) the prevalent use of learning algorithms, and 2) a focus on rapid recovery and replanning techniques; we present several novel methods and algorithms that we developed for the quadruped and that illustrate these two themes. We evaluate the performance of these different methods, and also present and discuss the performance of our system on the official Learning Locomotion tests.