This video demonstration of PAL Robotics’ Kangaroo free-walking was possible thanks to the latest developments in software and hardware on the Kangaroo platform.
PAL Robotics’ Kangaroo has been designed to be both lightweight and powerful, enabling the robot to perform agile maneuvers like running, jumping, and withstanding impacts.
The team at PAL Robotics faced a challenge as there are only a few control algorithms and libraries that support closed kinematic chains. To overcome this challenge, we implemented different approaches:
- Defining the full model of the robot and implementing a library that computes all the transformations using virtual constraints.
- Defining a simple model and integrating all the non-linear transformations in the ROS transmissions.
Using those approaches we demonstrated PAL Robotics’ Kangaroo doing the following:
- Walking using a ZMP-based (Zero moment point) position control algorithm.