As I am working to improve the gaits of the mjbots quad A1, one aspect I’ve wanted to tackle for a long time is improving the compliance characteristics of the whole robot. Here’s a small step in that direction.

Existing compliance strategy

The quad A1 uses qdd100 servos for each of its joints. The “qdd” in qdd100 stands for “quasi direct drive”. In a quasi direct drive actuator, a low gearing ratio is used, typically less than 10 to 1, which minimizes the amount of backlash and reflected inertia as observed at the output. Then, high rate electronic control of torque in the servo based on current and position feedback allows for dynamic manipulation of the spring and dampening of the resulting system.

Another option is a series elastic actuator, which uses a traditional high gear reduction servo with a mechanical spring or elastic mechanism inline with the load. Sometimes a separate motorized actuation mechanism can be used to vary the damping properties of the elastic element. This is in principle similar to the quasi direct drive approach, but suffers from a limited overall control bandwidth. Despite being “springy”, QDD servos are still able to have a very high effective mechanical control bandwidth, on the order of hundreds of hertz.

For the quad A1 to date, the compliance it exhibits is largely due to the qdd100’s internal control algorithms, and to a very minor extent, flexing in the mechanical structures of the quad A1 itself. This does work, and gives decent results.

Limitations

The biggest limitation of solely using this approach, is that since the compliance is performed at the joint level, it has no knowledge of the current 3d configuration of the leg. The resulting compliance in 3D space is highly non-linear and depends upon where in configuration space the leg is at that point in time. For instance, if the back legs are configured to have the knee very bent, but the front legs are not, then the back knee needs a much larger restorative torque per unit rotation to have the same linear restorative force at the tip of the leg.

That results in artifacts like shown in the video at the bottom. When the robot falls with the legs not in an identical configuration, the robot ends up pitching or rolling depending upon how the compliance interacts with the current leg geometry.

A “fix”

In my original designs for the moteus controller, I had left a high rate “inter-leg” bus option in the design, where each controller could exchange IK information at the full control rate, so that all compliance could be performed in the 3D space, rather than in joint space. However, as the design progressed, and I failed to implement it, I dropped that capability to simplify and reduce costs.

Here, I ended up implementing something purely in software which doesn’t have the same level of performance as that system would have, but also doesn’t require additional dedicated high rate communication transceivers on every servo control board. The 3D PD controller is just run on the raspberry pi at the regular control update rate (400Hz currently). That makes the control flow look like this:

Results

While this solution isn’t perfect, it does give better results in many scenarios. I applied some disturbances to the robot with either solely joint level controllers, or joint plus XYZ controllers. For the two cases, I tried to tune the controllers to a similar level of stiffness and damping to make the comparison as fair as possible. Walking is generally improved as well, even with just a constant compliance throughout the gait cycle.