Simultaneous Contact-Rich Grasping and Locomotion via Distributed Optimization Enabling Free-Climbing for Multi-Limbed Robots

Abstract

While motion planning of locomotion for legged robots has shown great success, motion planning for legged robots with dexterous multi-finger grasping is not mature yet. We present an efficient motion planning framework for simultaneously solving locomotion (e.g., centroidal dynamics), grasping (e.g., patch contact), and contact (e.g., gait) problems. To accelerate the planning process, we propose distributed optimization frameworks based on Alternating Direction Methods of Multipliers (ADMM) to solve the original large-scale Mixed-Integer NonLinear Programming (MINLP). The resulting frameworks use Mixed-Integer Quadratic Programming (MIQP) to solve contact and NonLinear Programming (NLP) to solve nonlinear dynamics, which are more computationally tractable and less sensitive to parameters. Also, we explicitly enforce patch contact constraints from limit surfaces with micro-spine grippers. We demonstrate our proposed framework in the hardware experiments, showing that the multi-limbed robot is able to realize various motions including free-climbing at a slope angle 45° with a much shorter planning time.

Accepted for the 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2022). Hardware implementation videos: https://youtu.be/QLH1shghqQ0

References in corpus (4)

• Humanoid Loco-manipulation Planning based on Graph Search and Reachability Maps
• Risk-Aware Motion Planning for a Limbed Robot with Stochastic Gripping Forces Using Nonlinear Programming
• Robust Pivoting: Exploiting Frictional Stability Using Bilevel Optimization
• Chance-Constrained Optimization in Contact-Rich Systems for Robust Manipulation

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• Covariance Steering for Uncertain Contact-rich Systems
• Robust Pivoting Manipulation using Contact Implicit Bilevel Optimization
• Is Linear Feedback on Smoothed Dynamics Sufficient for Stabilizing Contact-Rich Plans?
• A Pin-Array Structure for Gripping and Shape Recognition of Convex and Concave Terrain Profiles
• Hierarchical Contact-Rich Trajectory Optimization for Multi-Modal Manipulation using Tight Convex Relaxations
• Evaluating Data-driven Performances of Mixed Integer Bilinear Formulations for Book Placement Planning