Inverse Dynamics Control of Compliant Hybrid Zero Dynamic Walking

Abstract: We present a trajectory planning and control architecture for bipedal locomotion at a variety of speeds on a highly underactuated and compliant bipedal robot. A library of compliant walking trajectories are planned offline, and stored as compact arrays of polynomial coefficients for tracking online. The control implementation uses a floating-base inverse dynamics controller which generates dynamically consistent feedforward torques to realize walking using information obtained from the trajectory optimization. The effectiveness of the controller is demonstrated in simulation and on hardware for walking both indoors on flat terrain and over unplanned disturbances outdoors. Additionally, both the controller and optimization source code are made available on GitHub.