To guarantee its balance, a humanoid robot has to respect some contact force constraints. Therefore, traditional controllers generate motions complying with these constraints, but they usually consider the robot as stiff and the joint position perfectly known. However, several robots contain compliant parts in their structure. This flexibility modifies the forces at contacts and endangers balance. However, most solutions to stabilize the robot rely on force sensors. But several humanoid robots aren't equipped with these sensors. This paper has two aims. The first one is to develop a compliance stabilizer using the center of mass position and upper-body orientation through a viscoelastic reaction mass pendulum model. The second objective is to show the performances of such a stabilizer when relying only on an IMU-based state observer. Experimental results on HRP-2 robot show that the stabilization successfully rejects perturbations with high gains using only these IMU signals. Moreover, the actuation of the upper-body orientation provides redundancy, robustness and finally improved performances to the stabilizer.
['Alexis Mifsud', 'Mehdi Benallegue', 'Florent Lamiraux']
Stabilization of a compliant humanoid robot using only Inertial Measurement Units with a viscoelastic reaction mass pendulum model