Control of Dynamic Parkour Motions for a hopping leg on a Broomstick

As legged locomotion in nature is very dynamic and rich, this elegant form of locomotion should also be exploited by robots to enable efficient and unrestricted locomotion even on difficult terrain. As a contribution to those efforts, work is to be conducted on the robotic system of a hopping leg on a broomstick (two active and two passive DOF).
The thesis goal is to achieve robust control which enables the robot to surpass a difficult parkour by exploiting its environment. In a first step, a non-optimal control based on a finite state machine and a pd-control is proposed. Precise hopping is enabled by feed-forward inputs resulting from motion planning computations. The results of this approach are shown and evaluated both in the simulation environment and on the real system.
Prospects for future steps are given, which aim to improve the parkour abilities by incorporation of optimal control.