Collision-Free MPC for Legged Robots in Static and Dynamic Scenes

Understand

We present a model predictive controller (MPC) that automatically discovers collision-free locomotion while simultaneously taking into account the system dynamics, friction constraints, and kinematic limitations.

• A relaxed barrier function is added to the optimization's cost function, leading to collision avoidance behavior without increasing the problem's computational complexity.
• Our holistic approach does not require any heuristics and enables legged robots to find whole-body motions in the presence of static and dynamic obstacles.
• We use a dynamically generated euclidean signed distance field for static collision checking.