Robust Whole-Body Motion Control of Legged Robots
This work addresses robust motion control for legged robots, which is crucial for real-world applications like search and rescue or industrial automation, representing a novel method for a known bottleneck.
The paper tackles the problem of whole-body motion control for legged robots by introducing a robust control architecture that guarantees stability and performance despite model mismatches and uncertainties, and demonstrates improved performance compared to a standard inverse dynamics approach on a quadruped robot.
We introduce a robust control architecture for the whole-body motion control of torque controlled robots with arms and legs. The method is based on the robust control of contact forces in order to track a planned Center of Mass trajectory. Its appeal lies in the ability to guarantee robust stability and performance despite rigid body model mismatch, actuator dynamics, delays, contact surface stiffness, and unobserved ground profiles. Furthermore, we introduce a task space decomposition approach which removes the coupling effects between contact force controller and the other non-contact controllers. Finally, we verify our control performance on a quadruped robot and compare its performance to a standard inverse dynamics approach on hardware.