Motion planning of a bipedal miniature crawling robot in hybrid configuration space

This paper describes the motion planning of a bipedal crawling robot with an under-actuated mechanism and multiple locomotion modes. A hybrid configuration space is proposed to incorporate the continuous configuration space with discrete motion status space imposed by the kinematic constraints. Under the hybrid configuration space framework, a motion planning method is developed which consists of a global planner and a local planner to generate a collision-free path and a feasible motion sequence to travel along the path. A cost function is defined based on the motion status information to guide the search for an optimal path. Simulation and experimental results have verified the theoretical development.