Collision detection and identification for a legged manipulator

Abstract-- To safely deploy legged robots in the real world it is necessary to provide them with the ability to reliably detect unexpected contacts and accurately estimate the corresponding contact force. In this paper, we propose a collision detection and identification pipeline for a quadrupedal manipulator. We first introduce an approach to estimate the collision time span based on band-pass filtering and show that this information is key for obtaining accurate collision force estimates. We then improve the accuracy of the identified force magnitude by compensating for model inaccuracies, unmodeled loads, and any other potential source of quasi-static disturbances acting on the robot. Quadrupedal robots have recently become sufficiently advanced to be deployed in unknown and unstructured environments, where they could operate alongside humans or phase (e.g., detecting a collision when there is none) or other robots.