I have updated the quadruped kinematics program to display all four legs and calculate their IK. I have also started working on the ways various walking gates can be loaded and executed. I found an interesting creeping walk gait from this useful quadruped robot gait study article, and replicated it below for use with my robot:
As you can see, the patterns are replicated in quadrants, in order to complete a full gait where each leg is moved forward once. In my test program, I use the up/down and forward/back position of each leg, to drive the foot target for each leg, as was done previously with the GUI sliders and gamepad.
The lateral swing of each leg (first joint) is not changed, but this can be looked at later. The “ankle” (last two joints) is controlled such that the leg plane is always parallel to the ground.
This is what the current state of the program looks like:
The foot target values are loaded from a CSV into the Python program, and the IK is run for each leg, going through the whole gait sequence:
I have also added the option to interrupt and run another gait sequence at any point. The reason for this is to try and experiment how to best switch or blend from one gait to another. For now, if a new gait is loaded, the program will stop the current gait, and compare the current pose to all poses in the new gait. The new gait will then start at the pose which most closely matches the current pose, by using a simple distance metric.
If the 8 values of up/down/fwd/back for all legs are in an array LastPose for the last pose the robot was in, and CurrPose for the current pose of interest from the new gait, then the pseudocode looks something like this:
DistanceMetric = 0
for i = 0 to 7
{
d[i] = abs(CurrPose[i] - LastPose[i])
if d[i] > threshold
d[i] += penalty
DistanceMetric += d[i]
}
If the distance in any particular direction is larger than some threshold, then an arbitrary penalty value can be added. This will bias the calculation against outliers: a pose with evenly distributed distances will be preferred over a pose with an overall small distance but large distance in one direction. This may not actually be of much use in practice, but can be tweaked or removed later.
The above pose switching idea will be expanded on, so that the robot can seemlessly blend between predefined walking gaits, e.g. when in order to turn left and right or speed up and down.
The next step is to start porting all this test code onto the Arbotix, which has a few minor challenges: Ideally the IK matrix operations need to be done efficiently without extra overhead from additional libraries. The gait values which are loaded from a CSV file need to be hard-coded, however this should be simple to do, since as shown above a gait uses the same target values rearranged across quadrants.
Until next time!
Cognitive Dissonance 