Comparing Foot Placement Strategies for Planar Bipedal Walking

A number of foot placement strategies for walking have been proposed that make use of widely varying model complexities. Although a number of successful demonstrations have been individually shown in simulation and on physical robots, it is difficult to make a direct performance comparison due to the large differences in hardware, gait generation strategy, control system gains, actuator saturation limits, sensor noise, and many other physical limitations. Here we present a quantitative stability comparison of four foot-placement strategies.

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Inertial Parameter Estimation of Floating Base Humanoid Systems using Partial Force Sensing

In this work, we outline a theoretical framework for whole body inertial parameter estimation, including the unactuated floating base. Using a least squares minimization approach, conducted within the nullspace of unmeasured degrees of freedom, we are able to use a partial force sensor set for full-body estimation, e.g. using only joint torque sensors, allowing for estimation when contact force measurement is unavailable or unreliable (e.g. due to slipping, rolling contacts, etc.).

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