Experimental Validation of a Kinematic Control Strategy for Trajectory Tracking in Quadruped Robots

This work presents a high-level control architecture for trajectory tracking in quadruped robots. The proposed controller is based on the motion kinematics of the robot's center of mass (CoM). The proposed strategy transforms planned trajectories in Cartesian space into motion velocity commands for the robot, using a differential kinematic model that relates the velocity of the robot's operational point to its velocity in the XY-plane. The control scheme is organized hierarchically, where the kinematic controller operates independently from the system dynamics, which are handled by low-level controllers. The proposed control architecture is experimentally validated using the Unitree Go2 quadruped robot, employing MATLAB and ROS2 tools. The results confirm the feasibility of using purely kinematic models for high-level locomotion task control under real-world operating conditions. © 2025 IEEE.