Posture and Balance Control for Biped Robots based on Contact Force Optimization

Abstract

This paper presents a new balancing control approach for regulating the center of mass position and trunk orientation of a bipedal robot in a compliant way. The controller computes a desired wrench (force and torque) required to recover the posture when an unknown external perturbation has changed the posture of the robot. This wrench is later distributed as forces at predefined contact points via a constrained optimization, which aims at achieving the desired wrench while minimizing the Euclidean norm of the contact forces. The formulation of the force distribution as an optimization problem is adopted from the grasping literature and allows to consider restrictions coming from the friction between the contact points and the ground.