Evaluation of Legged Robot Landing Capability Under Aggressive Linear and Angular Velocities

Abstract: This paper proposes a method to evaluate the capability of aggressive legged robot landing under significant touchdown linear and angular velocities upon impact. Our approach builds upon the Planar Inverted Pendulum with Flywheel (PIPF) model and introduces a landing framework for the first stance step on a non-dimensional basis. We develop a nonlinear framework with iterative constrained trajectory optimization to stabilize the first stance step prior to N-step Capturability analysis. Performance maps across many different initial conditions reveal approximately linear boundaries as well as the effect of inertia, body incidence angle and leg attacking angle on the boundary shape. Our method also yields the engineering insight that body inertia affects the performance map the most, hence its optimization can be prioritized when the target is to improve robot landing efficacy.