Contact Force Estimation Method of Legged-Robot and Its Application in Impedance Control

Legged robots have extremely strong adaptability in different terrain environment and their stable walking in the wild is still a current research hotspot. Although they have shown great motion performance in recent years, most of them rely on high-performance sensors, especially force sensors settled on foot. However, it is impractical to select special forces sensors in the field environment, and the performance degradation and noise during the usage will bring fatal control defects. In order to solve this problem, we propose a foot contact force estimation method that does not require force sensors, and applies the estimated contact force to the impedance control of the legged robot to achieve the robot's active compliance control. The method of force estimation is based on the generalized momentum of the robot. It only needs to provide the position information of the joint and the information of the applied control torque. The designed feedforward and compensation terms effectively improve the speed and accuracy of the force estimation. We improved the response speed of the system to the contact force by improving the structure of the impedance control, and applied the estimated contact force to the impedance control to achieve the stable motion of the quadruped robot. Simulation experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed force estimation method.