Balance Stability Augmentation for Wheel-Legged Biped Robot through Arm Acceleration Control

A self-balancing wheel-legged robot provides higher maneuverability and mobility than legged biped robots. For this reason, wheel-legged systems have attracted enormous interest from academia and commercial sectors in recent years. Most of the past works in this field mainly focused on lower body stabilization. Motivated by the human ability to maintain balance in laborious activities by articulating the arm actively, we explore and analyze the active arm control on top of the wheel-legged system to assist in its balance recovery during external pushes and disturbances. This paper presents a control framework to improve the stability and robustness of an underactuated self-balancing wheel-legged robot using its upper limb arm. Furthermore, we use the centroidal moment pivot (CMP) as a key metric to quantitatively evaluate the effect of the active arm usage on the balance stability improvement of the robot in the ROS-Gazebo environment. The difference from the case of nonusage of arm is verified to clarify the impact of the active arm quantitatively. This concept would lead to the wheel-legged biped robot with an active arm for dual purposes, one is for carrying objects, another is for increasing the balance stability. This point is important for future application in a real-world environment with human-robot interactions.