Robustness to inertial parameter errors for legged robots balancing on level ground

Model-based control has become more and more popular in the legged robots community in the last ten years. The key idea is to exploit a model of the system to compute precise motor commands that result in the desired motion. This allows to improve the quality of the motion tracking, while using lower gains, leading so to higher compliance. However, the main flaw of this approach is typically its lack of robustness to modeling errors. In this paper we focus on the robustness of inverse-dynamics control to errors in the inertial parameters of the robot. We assume these parameters to be known, but only with a certain accuracy. We then propose a computationally-efficient optimization-based controller that ensures the balance of the robot despite these uncertainties. We used the proposed controller in simulation to perform different reaching tasks with the HRP-2 humanoid robot, in the presence of various modeling errors. Comparisons against a standard inverse-dynamics controller through hundreds of simulations show the superiority of the proposed controller in ensuring the robot balance.