A buffering method for quadruped robots based on active impedance control

Compared with wheeled or tracked robots,legged robots exhibit advantages on agile locomotion and higher survival chance for deadly impacts. A buffering strategy is proposed for quadruped robots with non-extreme initial attitudes from the end of air-righting to the steady standing on the ground.This approach consists of landing phase,buffering phase and recovering phase. The variable stiffness control,proportional-derivative( PD) force control and foot trajectory planning are applied to the joints of quadruped robots until the end of the recovering phase. The PD parameters are tuned according to the desired performance of each phase. The above approach is verified on a virtual platform.