Probabilistic foot contact estimation by fusing information from dynamics and differential/forward kinematics

Abstract

Legged robots require a robust and fast responding feet contact detection strategy. Common force sensors are often too heavy and can be easily damaged during impacts with the terrain. Therefore, it is desirable to detect a contact without a force sensor. This paper introduces a probabilistic contact detection strategy which considers full dynamics and differential/forward kinematics to maximize the use of available information for contact estimation. This papers shows that such strategy is much more accurate than the state-of-the-art strategy that only take one measure into account, with a quadrupedal robot.