Developing a Distributed Control Architecture for Legged Robot Locomotion

Control of legged robots is a complex task involving high degree of freedom underactuated systems with contact constraints. This work presents a control architecture which leverages simplifications and model segregation in an attempt to develop a transparent solution to the locomotion problem. By splitting a robot’s model into a set of legs and a main body, each of these smaller dimension components become easier to analyze and a controller is developed for each of them. The controllers’ interface is done with the wrenches applied by each leg, making the distribution of the leg controllers’ inputs linear. The different controllers are tested in a 2D simulation.