Cassie Autonomous Navigation: Smooth Motion

Cassie Blue navigates around furniture treated as obstacles in the Ford Robotics Building at the University of Michigan. All the clips in this video are 1x on purpose to show Cassie’s motion. The LiDAR and IMU data are fused in real-time to form an elevation map. The system consists of a low-frequency planning thread (5 Hz) to find an asymptotically optimal path and a high-frequency reactive thread (300 Hz) to accommodate robot deviation. The planning thread includes: a multi-layer local map to compute traversability for the robot on the terrain; an anytime omnidirectional Control Lyapunov Function (CLF) for use with a Rapidly Exploring Random Tree Star (RRT*) that generates a vector field for specifying motion between nodes; a sub-goal finder when the final goal is outside of the current map; and a finite-state machine to handle high-level mission decisions. The paper [] provides full details on the reactive planning system. The software for the planning package is public