Simulation of foot-ground contact for bipedal robots

This paper discusses a way of simulating of foot-ground contact for bipedal robots. For walking robots the most fundamental issue is maintaining contact between the foot and the ground. During simulation, the most common approach is to assume rigid contact between the foot and the ground. However this kind of contact cannot model sliding, foot rotation and deformation. That can create inaccurate results and compromise the simulation outcome, which can jeopardize the usefulness of the simulation at the first place. In this paper the authors present a way to simulate viscoelastic foot-ground contact in order to model contact dynamics more precisely. Firstly, the contact model for a single point is derived. After that, the contact between the foot and ground is modeled as a matrix of single point contacts. Several simulation cases which present the usefulness and ease of use of such a model are presented.