Opening a Spring-Loaded Door with a Legged Manipulator

This paper outlines the process of opening a springloaded door with a quadrupedal mobile manipulator. A Cartesian trajectory planner based on manifold interpolation is developed to provide designed base and gripper trajectories, and a whole-body controller based on the hierarchical inverse dynamics approach is implemented to enable the robot to cope with unknown external disturbances. The spring-loaded door opening task is successfully achieved in simulation and robust interaction is established without creating undesired forces.