Motion planning and control of planar serial chain articulating locomotion system

Abstract

This paper addresses two important problems in motion planning and control of serial chain planar articulating locomotion systems moving on a flat surface. Locomotion systems generally use closed curve cyclic gaits to perform maneuvers in the environment. The geometric mechanics tools are used to identify the cyclic gaits. Firstly, a motion control approach is presented using a single cyclic gait parametrized with variable gait parameters. The parameterized gait is used to drive the system along a continuous trajectory with varying curvature. On the other hand, the proposed approach presents how the gait parameters can be controlled to smoothly track a continuous trajectory. Secondly, this paper presents a joint coordination approach to generalize the height function based approach to design cyclic gaits for the system having joint space with more than two degrees of freedom. Using joint coordination approach, cyclic gaits can be designed for different motion behaviors such as longitudinal motion, sideways motion and rotation in place. The joint coordination approach also helps generalizing the proposed motion control approach to planar serial chain articulating robots with any even number of joints.