Biologically inspired deadbeat control for running on 3D stepping stones

This paper enhances the Biologically Inspired Dead-beat (BID) controller from [1], to not only enable three-dimensional bipedal running on a horizontal plane but also on 3D stepping-stones. Further contributions of the paper are explicit foot step targeting during running, leg cross-over avoidance and the embedding of the BID controller into a QP-based whole-body controller. The BID controller is based on the encoding of leg forces and CoM trajectories during stance as polynomial splines, allowing for intuitive and primarily analytical controller design. It allows a real-time implementation, is highly robust against perturbations and enables versatile running patterns. The performance of the control framework is tested in various simulations for a bipedal point-mass model and an articulated multi-body model of the humanoid robot Toro.