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Quadruped robot foothold intelligence for safe locomotion on hazardous terrain
Laboratory of Mechanics and Advanced Energical Systems, National Polytechnic School of Constantine, Constantine, Algeria.
Luleå University of Technology, Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering, Signals and Systems.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-1814-4278
LISSI, University Paris-Est Créteil, 94400, Vitry-sur-Seine, France.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-7706-4171
Department of Electromechanics, Faculty of Construction Engineering, University of Tizi Ouzou UMMTO, Tizi Ouzou, Algeria.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-3154-1726
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2026 (English)In: Scientific Reports, E-ISSN 2045-2322, Vol. 16, article id 29496Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Safe quadruped locomotion over hazardous terrain cannot be reduced to selecting the locally safest foothold, because a geometrically reachable contact may still deteriorate the subsequent support phase, increase actuator demand, approach friction limits, or leave insufficient clearance for the robot body. This work presents STEP-CBF+, a reduced-order predictive foothold-and-posture screening framework that couples terrain-risk memory, DCM/ZMP-based support prediction, discrete-time barrier screening, energy-aware motion regularization, three-joint torque feasibility, friction-cone constraints, and anticipatory body-height adaptation within a single candidate-selection layer. The study considers a 13.5 kg quadruped with 3-DOF legs executing a crawl gait with duty factor 0.75 and evaluating 49 foothold candidates at each decision. Six hazardous-terrain conditions are examined over 25 randomized terrain and payload realizations and compared with nominal, risk-only, and reduced-order convex-MPC strategies. Performance is quantified using independent fall and slip outcomes, distance before failure, dynamic support margins, tracking accuracy, actuator and friction utilization, computation time, and component-wise ablations. Across all scenarios, STEP-CBF+ reduces the mean fall rate to 4.0% while increasing the stable-step fraction to 77.3%, compared with 16.7–18.7% falls and 72.2–73.7% stable steps for the three comparators. A particularly revealing result appears on inclined terrain, where stable time reaches 86.0% and the minimum dynamic margin improves to -0.032 m while peak actuator utilization is reduced. In the confined duck-under scenario, anticipatory posture adaptation enables collision-free traversal and zero falls, whereas all non-height-adaptive strategies fail. The method retains a mean selection time of approximately 13.6 ms, compared with 30.5 ms for the reduced-order convex-MPC implementation. The results indicate that the main benefit of STEP-CBF+ emerges when contact feasibility must be evaluated together with the consequences of the next support phase and body posture, providing an interpretable intermediate safety layer between terrain perception and lower-level locomotion control. The conclusions remain limited to reduced-order randomized simulation and do not constitute a whole-body nonlinear invariance proof or hardware validation.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Springer Nature, 2026. Vol. 16, article id 29496
Keywords [en]
Quadruped robot, Foothold planning, Discrete-time barrier screening, Hazardous terrain, Friction cone, Torque feasibility, DCM, ZMP, Safe locomotion
National Category
Robotics and automation
Research subject
Automatic Control
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:ltu:diva-119889DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-72507-wISI: 001883412100007OAI: oai:DiVA.org:ltu-119889DiVA, id: diva2:2105059
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Full text license: CC BY

Available from: 2026-09-25 Created: 2026-09-25 Last updated: 2026-10-05Bibliographically approved

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Ghoul, Abdelhamid

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4041424344454643 of 103
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