Towards dynamic Narrow path walking on NU's Husky

This research focuses on enabling Northeastern University's Husky, a multi-modal quadrupedal robot, to navigate narrow paths akin to various animals in nature. The Husky is equipped with thrusters to stabilize its body during dynamic maneuvers, addressing challenges inherent in aerial-legged systems. The approach involves modeling the robot as HROM (Husky Reduced Model) and creating an optimal control framework using linearized dynamics for narrow path walking. The thesis introduces a gait scheduling method to generate an open-loop walking gait and validates these gaits through a high-fidelity Simscape simulation. Experimental results of the open-loop walking are presented, accompanied by potential directions for advancing this robotic system.

A Letter on Progress Made on Husky Carbon: A Legged-Aerial, Multi-modal Platform

Animals, such as birds, widely use multi-modal locomotion by combining legged and aerial mobility with dominant inertial effects. The robotic biomimicry of this multi-modal locomotion feat can yield ultra-flexible systems in terms of their ability to negotiate their task spaces. The main objective of this paper is to discuss the challenges in achieving multi-modal locomotion, and to report our progress in developing our quadrupedal robot capable of multi-modal locomotion (legged and aerial locomotion), the Husky Carbon. We report the mechanical and electrical components utilized in our robot, in addition to the simulation and experimentation done to achieve our goal in developing a versatile multi-modal robotic platform.