State estimation and traversability map construction method of a quadruped robot on soft uneven terrain

Abstract Quadruped robots show excellent application prospects in complex environment detection and rescue. At present, scholars mainly focus on quadruped walking in rigid environments. However, quadruped robots often need to pass through uneven and soft unconstructed terrains, prone to slip and impact. The mismatch between the planned foothold position and the real one resulting from environmental uncertainties makes the robot unstable. In this paper, the state estimation and traversability map construction methods are proposed for quadruped robots to achieve stable walking in an unstructured environment, especially on soft terrains. First, the Error‐state Kalman Filter (ErKF) is extended by optimizing the leg odometry information to get an accurate robot state, especially in soft, uneven terrain. The ErKF method fuses the sensor data from the inertial measurement unit, laser, camera, and leg odometry. The leg odometry is optimized by considering the foot slippage, which easily occurs in soft uneven terrains. Then, the unstructured environment is parameterized and modeled by the terrain inclination, roughness, height, and stiffness. A traversability map, which is essential for robot path and foothold planning in autonomous movement, is constructed with the above parameters. Finally, the proposed method is verified by simulation and experiments. The results show that the quadruped robot can walk stably on different soft and uneven terrains.