Terrestrial Locomotion of PogoX with Thrust-to-weight Ratio Less Than 1
Channel: Xiaobin XIONG
Date: 2023-09-24

Paper (ICRA24)): https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.13737 
Lab Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@WELL-ROBOTICS
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00:00 Intro 
00:20 Hardware Design
00:35 Control Synthesis 
00:56 Disturbance Test
01:34 Conclusion 
02:11 Bloopers 
02:19 Acknowledgement
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Abstract: We present a novel controller design on a robotic locomotor that combines an aerial vehicle with a spring-loaded leg. The main motivation is to enable the terrestrial locomotion capability on aerial vehicles so that they can carry heavy loads: heavy enough that flying is no longer possible, e.g., when the thrust-to-weight ratio (TWR) is small. The robot is designed with a pogo-stick leg and a quadrotor, and thus it is named as PogoX. We show that with a simple and lightweight spring-loaded leg, the robot is capable of hopping with TWR less than 1. The control of hopping is realized via two components: a vertical height control via control Lyapunov function-based energy shaping, and a step-to-step (S2S) dynamics based horizontal velocity control that is inspired by the hopping of the Spring-Loaded Inverted Pendulum (SLIP). The controller is successfully realized on the physical robot, showing dynamic terrestrial locomotion of PogoX which can hop at variable heights and different horizontal velocities with robustness to ground height variations and external pushes.