Falls control using posture reshaping and active compliance

We address the problem of humanoid falls when they are unavoidable. We propose a control strategy that combines two behaviors: i) closed-loop posture reshaping - during the falling phase, which allows best impact absorption from a predefined taxonomy, coupled with ii) an active compliance through instant PD gains reduction, instead of shutting-off the actuators or instead of high-gains control with additional implements as previously proposed by other works. We perform several simulations to assess our strategy and made experimental trials on the HRP-4 humanoid robot.