Real World Autonomous Navigation Experiments Using a Quadruped Robot

This paper describes our autonomous navigation system based on A1, a commercially available quadruped robot. We mounted a 3D Lidar and an ultra-mobile PC on the robot and ported our recognition and planning software. We used the controller provided by the manufacturer for walking control, which can be operated by giving two-dimensional abstract velocity commands. We conducted navigation experiments by participating in Tsukuba Challenge 2021, and we encountered a number of failure cases, including sudden falls caused by overheating. We overcame those problems, and our robot eventually completed a 2 km autonomous walk in a real urban environment, except for manual battery exchanges.