A Comparative Study of Floating-Base Space Parameterizations for Agile Whole-Body Motion Planning

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tsiatsianas, Evangelos, Kiourt, Chairi, Chatzilygeroudis, Konstantinos
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915447643832320
author Tsiatsianas, Evangelos
Kiourt, Chairi
Chatzilygeroudis, Konstantinos
author_facet Tsiatsianas, Evangelos
Kiourt, Chairi
Chatzilygeroudis, Konstantinos
contents Automatically generating agile whole-body motions for legged and humanoid robots remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. While numerous trajectory optimization approaches have been proposed, there is no clear guideline on how the choice of floating-base space parameterization affects performance, especially for agile behaviors involving complex contact dynamics. In this paper, we present a comparative study of different parameterizations for direct transcription-based trajectory optimization of agile motions in legged systems. We systematically evaluate several common choices under identical optimization settings to ensure a fair comparison. Furthermore, we introduce a novel formulation based on the tangent space of SE(3) for representing the robot's floating-base pose, which, to our knowledge, has not received attention from the literature. This approach enables the use of mature off-the-shelf numerical solvers without requiring specialized manifold optimization techniques. We hope that our experiments and analysis will provide meaningful insights for selecting the appropriate floating-based representation for agile whole-body motion generation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_11520
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Comparative Study of Floating-Base Space Parameterizations for Agile Whole-Body Motion Planning
Tsiatsianas, Evangelos
Kiourt, Chairi
Chatzilygeroudis, Konstantinos
Robotics
Systems and Control
Optimization and Control
Automatically generating agile whole-body motions for legged and humanoid robots remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. While numerous trajectory optimization approaches have been proposed, there is no clear guideline on how the choice of floating-base space parameterization affects performance, especially for agile behaviors involving complex contact dynamics. In this paper, we present a comparative study of different parameterizations for direct transcription-based trajectory optimization of agile motions in legged systems. We systematically evaluate several common choices under identical optimization settings to ensure a fair comparison. Furthermore, we introduce a novel formulation based on the tangent space of SE(3) for representing the robot's floating-base pose, which, to our knowledge, has not received attention from the literature. This approach enables the use of mature off-the-shelf numerical solvers without requiring specialized manifold optimization techniques. We hope that our experiments and analysis will provide meaningful insights for selecting the appropriate floating-based representation for agile whole-body motion generation.
title A Comparative Study of Floating-Base Space Parameterizations for Agile Whole-Body Motion Planning
topic Robotics
Systems and Control
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11520