Learning the Cost Function for Foothold Selection in a Quadruped Robot

This paper is focused on designing a cost function of selecting a foothold for a physical quadruped robot walking on rough terrain. The quadruped robot is modeled with Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) parameters, and then a default foothold is defined based on the model. Time of Flight (TOF) camera is used to perceive terrain information and construct a 2.5D elevation map, on which the terrain features are detected. The cost function is defined as the weighted sum of several elements including terrain features and some features on the relative pose between the default foothold and other candidates. It is nearly impossible to hand-code the weight vector of the function, so the weights are learned using Supporting Vector Machine (SVM) techniques, and the training data set is generated from the 2.5D elevation map of a real terrain under the guidance of experts. Four candidate footholds around the default foothold are randomly sampled, and the expert gives the order of such four candidates by rotating and scaling the view for seeing clearly. Lastly, the learned cost function is used to select a suitable foothold and drive the quadruped robot to walk autonomously across the rough terrain with wooden steps. Comparing to the approach with the original standard static gait, the proposed cost function shows better performance.