Balancing Legged Robots on Visco-Elastic Contacts

Thomas Flayols (1) , Andrea del Prete (2, 2) , Majid Khadiv (3) , Nicolas Mansard (1) , Ludovic Righetti (4, 5)

1 LAAS-GEPETTO - Équipe Mouvement des Systèmes Anthropomorphes
2 UNITN - Università degli Studi di Trento = University of Trento
3 Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems [Tübingen]
4 Tandom School of Engineering, New York University
5 NYU - New York University [New York]

Contacts between robots and environment are often assumed to be rigid for control purposes. This assumption can lead to poor performance when contacts are soft and/or under-damped. However, the problem of balancing on soft contacts has not received much attention in the literature. This paper discusses four approaches to control a legged robot balancing on visco-elastic contacts. Two of these approaches are novel, whereas the other two are taken from the state of the art. Our simulation results show that no approach can outperform all the others in all situations. Performance heavily depends on the contact stiffness and the noises/uncertainties introduced in the simulation. These results sheds light on this challenging problem, while pointing out interesting directions for future investigation.

Mots clés: Elastic contacts; Balancing

Domaines: Robotique [cs.RO]

Thomas Flayols, Andrea del Prete, Majid Khadiv, Nicolas Mansard, Ludovic Righetti. Balancing Legged Robots on Visco-Elastic Contacts. 2019. ⟨hal-02310082⟩