Inspired by biomechanical studies, the spring-loaded inverted pendulum model is an effective behavior model to describe the running movement of animals and legged robots in the sagittal plane. However, when confronted with external lateral disturbances, the model has to move out of the 2-D plane and be extended to 3-D locomotion. With the degree of freedom increasing, the computational complexity is higher and the real-time control is more and more difficult, especially when considering the complex legged model. Here, we construct a control strategy based on the classical Raibert controller for legged locomotion under lateral impact disturbances. This strategy, named 3D-HFC, is composed of three core modules: touchdown angle control, body attitude angle control and energy compensation. The energy loss in each step is taken into consideration, and the real-time measured energy loss of the current step is adopted to predict that of the next step. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed control strategy on a simulated 3D-SLIP lower order model and a simulated running quadruped, which are perturbed by different impact forces. Furthermore, a quadruped bionic prototype named MBBOT was set up, on which lateral impact experiments were designed and implemented. Both simulation and experimental results show that the proposed approach can realize the impact disturbance rejection.
© 2022. The Author(s).