Teleoperating a Legged Manipulator through Whole-Body Control

In this work, we present a highly functional teleoperation system, that integrates a full-body inertia-based motion capture suit and three intuitive teleoperation strategies with a Whole-Body Control (WBC) framework, for quadrupedal legged manipulators. This enables the realisation of commands from the teleoperator that would otherwise not be possible, as the framework is able to utilise DoF redundancy to meet several objectives simultaneously, such as locking the gripper frame in position while the trunk completes a task. This is achieved through the WBC framework featuring a defined optimisation problem that solves a range of Cartesian and joint space tasks, while subject to a set of constraints (e.g. halt constraints). These tasks and constraints are highly modular and can be configured dynamically, allowing the teleoperator to switch between teleoperation strategies seamlessly. The overall system has been tested and validated through a physics-based simulation and a hardware test, demonstrating all functionality of the system, which in turn has been used to evaluate its effectiveness.