Whole-Body Impedance Coordinative Control for a Wheel-Legged Robot on Uncertain Terrain

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Abstract
This article proposes a whole-body impedance coordinative control framework for a wheel-legged humanoid robot to achieve adaptability on complex terrains while maintaining the robot’s upper body stability. The framework contains a bi-level control strategy. The outer level is a variable-damping impedance controller, which optimizes the damping parameters to ensure the stability of the upper body while holding an object. The inner level employs whole-body control (WBC) optimization that integrates real-time terrain estimation based on wheel-foot position and force data. It generates motor torques while accounting for dynamic constraints, joint limits, friction cones, real-time terrain updates, and a model-free friction compensation strategy. The proposed whole-body coordinative control method, tested on a newly developed quadruped humanoid robot, effectively enables passive stable manipulation for both indoor water-carrying and outdoor box-carrying tasks across varying and uneven terrains.
Funding Information
  • Tencent Robotics X Lab

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