Legged vehicle control and vibration reduction

This paper presents a design method of controller reducing the vibration of the upper body of a legged vehicle during locomotion. To design locomotion pattern generator, instead of using non-linear dynamics models and solving complex equations, the control strategy is simply based on the use of piecewise linear oscillators and a few parameters that can be easily obtained and tuned. In this research framework, we present tuning algorithms of both the rolling profile and the feedback controllers gains such that the mechanical vibration in the legged vehicle during locomotion is attenuated. As a result, stable and smooth locomotion is obtained. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by experimental results.