Probabilistic Foot Contact Estimation by Fusing Information from Dynamics and Differential/Forward K

Goal:

measure force without force sensor
这类topic的文章要关注做的是collision detection还是contact detection
collision detection: detect an impact
contact detection: detect accurate timing of the loss of the contact as well

Contribution:

1.a probabilistic contact detection strategy
basic idea: 利用所有可以利用的information做contact state estimation，考虑了full dynamics and differential/forward kinematics, fuse这些information可以降低noise(modeling errors, inaccurate calibration,etc.)对contact detection的影响。

dynamics: acceleration
differential kinematics: speed
forward kinematics: improves the quality of the contact detection

It includes a full probabilistic model, consisting of a transition model and a measurement model, to fuse dynamics and forward/differential kinematics information together.

Modeling:
目标是identify the binary foot contact state$X_t$, where $N$ and $F$ represent ‘on the terrain’and ‘off the terrain’
It is assumed that Markov assumption holds in the system which means that the contact state probability distribution is independent of the previous states given the state at the current time step.