Gaitor: Learning a Unified Representation Across Gaits for Real-World Quadruped Locomotion

The current state-of-the-art in quadruped locomotion is able to produce robust motion for terrain traversal but requires the segmentation of a desired robot trajectory into a discrete set of locomotion skills such as trot and crawl. In contrast, in this work we demonstrate the feasibility of learning a single, unified representation for quadruped locomotion enabling continuous blending between gait types and characteristics. We present Gaitor, which learns a disentangled representation of locomotion skills, thereby sharing information common to all gait types seen during training. The structure emerging in the learnt representation is interpretable in that it is found to encode phase correlations between the different gait types. These can be leveraged to produce continuous gait transitions. In addition, foot swing characteristics are disentangled and directly addressable. Together with a rudimentary terrain encoding and a learned planner operating in this structured latent representation, Gaitor is able to take motion commands including desired gait type and characteristics from a user while reacting to uneven terrain. We evaluate Gaitor in both simulated and real-world settings on the ANYmal C platform. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work learning such a unified and interpretable latent representation for multiple gaits, resulting in on-demand continuous blending between different locomotion modes on a real quadruped robot.

Towards Agility: A Momentum Aware Trajectory Optimisation Framework using Full-Centroidal Dynamics & Implicit Inverse Kinematics

Online planning and execution of acrobatic maneuvers pose significant challenges in legged locomotion. Their underlying combinatorial nature, along with the current hardware's limitations constitute the main obstacles in unlocking the true potential of legged-robots. This letter tries to expose the intricacies of these optimal control problems in a tangible way, directly applicable to the creation of more efficient online trajectory optimisation frameworks. By analysing the fundamental principles that shape the behaviour of the system, the dynamics themselves can be exploited to surpass its hardware limitations. More specifically, a trajectory optimisation formulation is proposed that exploits the system's high-order nonlinearities, such as the nonholonomy of the angular momentum, and phase-space symmetries in order to produce feasible high-acceleration maneuvers. By leveraging the full-centroidal dynamics of the quadruped ANYmal C and directly optimising its footholds and contact forces, the framework is capable of producing efficient motion plans with low computational overhead. The feasibility of the produced trajectories is ensured by taking into account the configuration-dependent inertial properties of the robot during the planning process, while its robustness is increased by supplying the full analytic derivatives & hessians to the solver. Finally, a significant portion of the discussion is centred around the deployment of the proposed framework on the ANYmal C platform, while its true capabilities are demonstrated through real-world experiments, with the successful execution of high-acceleration motion scenarios like the squat-jump.