Stability and performance of the compliance controller of the quadruped robot HyQ

Abstract

A legged robot has to deal with environmental contacts every time it takes a step. To properly handle these interactions, it is desirable to be able to set the foot compliance. For an actively-compliant legged robot, in order to ensure a stable contact with the environment the robot leg has to be passive at the contact point. In this work, we asses some passivity and stability issues of the actively-compliant leg of the quadruped robot HyQ, which employs a highperformance cascade compliance controller. We demonstrate that both the nested torque loop performance as well as the actuator bandwidth have a strong influence in the range of virtual impedances that can be passively rendered by the robot leg. Based on the stability analyses and experimental results, we propose a procedure for designing cascade compliance controllers. Furthermore, we experimentally demonstrate that the HyQ's actively-compliant leg is able to reproduce the compliant behavior presented by an identical but passively-compliant version of the same leg.