Bipedal Walking on Constrained Footholds with MPC Footstep Control

Bipedal robots promise the ability to traverse rough terrain quickly and efficiently, and indeed, humanoid robots can now use strong ankles and careful foot placement to traverse discontinuous terrain. However, more agile underactuated bipeds have small feet and weak ankles, and must constantly adjust their planned footstep position to maintain balance. We introduce a new model-predictive footstep controller which jointly optimizes over the robot's discrete choice of stepping surface, impending footstep position sequence, ankle torque in the sagittal plane, and center of mass trajectory, to track a velocity command. The controller is formulated as a single Mixed Integer Quadratic Program (MIQP) which is solved at 50-200 Hz, depending on terrain complexity. We implement a state of the art real-time elevation mapping and convex terrain decomposition framework to inform the controller of its surroundings in the form on convex polygons representing steppable terrain. We investigate the capabilities and challenges of our approach through hardware experiments on the underactuated biped Cassie.