Agile Legged-Wheeled Reconfigurable Navigation Planner Applied on the CENTAURO Robot

Hybrid legged-wheeled robots such as the CEN-TAURO, are capable of varying their footprint polygon to carry out various agile motions. This property can be advantageous for wheeled-only planning in cluttered spaces, which is our focus. In this paper, we present an improved algorithm that builds upon our previously introduced preliminary footprint varying A* planner, which was based on the rectangular symmetry of the foot support polygon. In particular, we introduce a Theta* based planner with trapezium-like search, which aims to further reduce the limitations imposed upon the wheeled-only navigation of the CENTAURO robot by the low-dimensional search space, maintaining the real-time computational efficiency. The method is tested on the simulated and real full-size CENTAURO robot in cluttered environments.