Perceptive Locomotion Through Nonlinear Model-Predictive Control

Dynamic locomotion in rough terrain requires accurate foot placement, collision avoidance, and planning of the underactuated dynamics of the system. Reliably optimizing for such motions and interactions in the presence of imperfect and often incomplete perceptive information is challenging. We present a complete perception, planning, and control pipeline, which can optimize motions for all degrees of freedom of the robot in real time. To mitigate the numerical challenges posed by the terrain, a sequence of convex inequality constraints is extracted as local approximations of foothold feasibility and embedded into an online model-predictive controller. Steppability classification, plane segmentation, and a…