Animal Gaits on Quadrupedal Robots Using Motion Matching and Model-Based Control

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the challenge of generating animal-like walking motions for legged robots. To this end, we propose a versatile and robust control pipeline that combines a state-of-the-art model-based controller with a data-driven technique that is commonly used in computer animation. We demonstrate the efficacy of our control framework on a variety of quadrupedal robots in simulation. We show, in particular, that our approach can automatically reproduce key characteristics of animal motions, including speed-specific gaits, unscripted footfall patterns for nonperiodic motions, and natural small variations in overall body movements.