  Generating dynamic jumping motions on legged robots remains a challenging
control problem as the full flight phase and large landing impact are expected.
Compared to quadrupedal robots or other multi-legged robots, bipedal robots
place higher requirements for the control strategy given a much smaller
footprint. To solve this problem, a novel heuristic landing planner is proposed
in this paper. With the momentum feedback during the flight phase, landing
locations can be updated to minimize the influence of uncertainties from
tracking errors or external disturbances when landing. To the best of our
knowledge, this is the first approach to take advantage of the flight phase to
reduce the impact of the jump landing which is implemented in the actual robot.
By integrating it with a modified kino-dynamics motion planner with centroidal
momentum and a low-level controller which explores the whole-body dynamics to
hierarchically handle multiple tasks, a complete and versatile jumping control
framework is designed in this paper. Extensive results of simulation and
hardware jumping experiments on a miniature bipedal robot with proprioceptive
actuation are provided to demonstrate that the proposed framework is able to
achieve human-like efficient and robust jumping tasks, including directional
jump, twisting jump, step jump, and somersaults.
