Locomotion planning and control for discretely-soft bodied legged robots

The distributed compliance of soft-legged robots enables them to explore complex environments using novel gaits with high levels of safety and adaptability. However, this makes designing, controlling, and motion planning for such systems often challenging due to a large number of unactuated/underactuated degrees of freedom. To address this issue, current solutions often include constraining their motion to a few predefined modes by design and typically require complicated data-driven system identification and controller design techniques. In this work, we present two geometric motion planning frameworks for an autonomous, discretely soft, closed kinematic chain articulated, insect-sized quadrupedal robot with electroadhesive feet - CLARI (Compliant Legged Articulated Robotic Insect). Inspired by geometric mechanics-based gait generation for serpentine robots, we develop 'gait controllers' for in-plane, `shape-shifting locomotion of CLARI. The ability to deliberately and precisely control the robot-ground interaction allows us to implement sequential 'electroadhered' strides of leg-pairs rendering the locomotion problem kinematic with exact solutions for robot configurations, and global trajectories. We expect this approach to generalize to n-linked robots with m ($<$n) legs.