Legged robots, particularly quadrupeds, offer promising navigation capabilities, especially in scenarios requiring traversal over diverse terrains and obstacle avoidance. This paper addresses the challenge of enabling legged robots to navigate complex environments effectively through the integration of data-driven path-planning methods. We propose an approach that utilizes differentiable planners, allowing the learning of end-to-end global plans via a neural network for commanding quadruped robots. The approach leverages 2D maps and obstacle specifications as inputs to generate a global path. To enhance the functionality of the developed neural network-based path planner, we use Vision Transformers (ViT) for map pre-processing, to enable the effective handling of larger maps. Experimental evaluations on two real robotic quadrupeds (Boston Dynamics Spot and Unitree Go1) demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of the proposed approach in generating reliable path plans.
RPL Group, UCL
"Footstep Planning in Rough Terrain for Bipedal Robots using Curved Contact Patches",
Dimitrios Kanoulas, Alexander Stumpf, Vignesh Sushrutha Raghavan, Chengxu Zhou, Alexia Toumpa, Oskar von Stryk, Darwin G. Caldwell, and Nikos Tsagarakis.
In the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2018.
"Vision-Based Foothold Contact Reasoning using Curved Surface Patches",
Dimitrios Kanoulas, Chengxu Zhou, Anh Nguyen, Georgios Kanoulas, Darwin G. Caldwell, and Nikos G. Tsagarakis.
In the 17th IEEE/RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, Humanoids 2017.
Best Interactive Paper Award Winner.