When HyQ is being yanked around in the video above, what it’s showing is that the robot is able to adjust where it’s placing its feet, even after starting to take a step. Most robots plan their steps by saying, “I’m going to put my foot in that spot over there, ready, go!” This works just fine, except when something happens between the time that the robot lifts its foot up in one place and puts it down in another. HyQ’s new controller allows it to replan almost continuously, enabling adjustments on the fly whether it’s in the middle of a step or not, making it much more robust to external disturbances, whether caused by slippery surfaces, mistakes in foot placement, or shoves from human meanies.

The rest of the video shows an example of a situation in which visual adaptation is critical to the health and happiness of the robot—gap crossing. Without visual feedback, gaps are potentially lethal to those skinny little robot legs. Rather than churn through an entire software stack devoted to interpreting sensor data and calculating optimal foot placement, HyQ instead uses a convolutional neural network trained on a bunch of terrain templates including gaps, bars, rocks, and other nasty things to interpret the 3D map of the area in front of it created by its onboard sensors. The neural network is up to 200 times faster at computation for footstep selection than traditional planning systems, which both enables the continuous planning and opens up the option to do more complex planning in the future, like specifying different gaits or body orientations to make the robot even more adaptable. And while it’s not in the video, the researchers tell us that HyQ can walk across those gaps even while it’s being yanked around.

Octavio Villarreal and Victor Barasuol, from the Dynamic Legged Systems lab at IIT, led by Claudio Semini, will be presenting this work at two IROS workshops on Friday: Development of Agile Robots, and Machine Learning in Robot Motion Planning. If you’re in Madrid, stop by and check it out, and if you’re not, ask yourself whether your commitment to robotics really could be just a bit more serious.

[ IIT ]