Contact Observer for Humanoid Robot Pepper based on Tracking Joint Position Discrepancies

In order to enable efficient control of a human-humanoid in physical contact settings, a real-time solution for a contact observer is required. We propose a novel approach for proprioceptive sensor based contact sensing suitable for affordable personal robots with no force/torque or electric current sensing. We combine robot model knowledge and the output of acceleration resolved quadratic programming whole-body controller to make a prediction of expected position tracking error for computing our proposed contact observer signal. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach in the experiments of contact detection and estimation of collision direction and intensity on a real humanoid robot Pepper platform controlled by a task-space multi-objective quadratic programming controller.