Online Feet Potential Fields for Quadruped Robots Navigation in Harsh Terrains

Quadruped robots have garnered significant attention in recent years due to their ability to navigate through challenging terrains. Among the various environments, agriculture fields are particularly difficult for legged robots, given the variability of soil types and conditions. To address this issue, this study proposes a novel navigation strategy that utilizes ground reaction forces to calculate online artificial potential fields, which are then applied to the robot’s feet to avoid low- traversability regions. The strategy also incorporates the net vector of the attractive potential field towards the goal and the repulsive field to avoid slippery regions, which dynamically adjusts the quadruped’s gait. A realistic simulation environment validates the proposed navigation framework with case studies on randomly generated terrains. A comprehensive comparison with baseline navigation methods is conducted to assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach.