Thrust-Assisted Biped Robot

Locomotion implementation for a biped robot with thrust assistance.

My introduction to bipedal locomotion research began with developing control strategies for a thrust-assisted bipedal robot, specifically the Harpy platform.

My first objective was to achieve planar walking on hardware, which I pursued by implementing linear inverted pendulum (LIP) walking without relying on thrust assistance. I developed a custom C++ controller and deployed it on a real-time Linux system, and I programmed the ELMO motor controllers to drive the leg actuators using PD control. The ELMO motor control code is available here.

Walking on the Harpy robot without thrust assistance (left) and leg movement using ELMO motor controllers (right).

I became interested in applying contact-implicit MPC to thrust-assisted bipedal locomotion, which motivated preliminary investigations into walking and jumping with thrust assistance.

Simulation of walking and jumping with thrust assistance using CI-MPC in Drake.