An innovative torque sensor design for the lightest hydraulic quadruped robot

High-performance legged robots that are required to navigate on unstructured and challenging terrain benefit from torque-controlled joints. High-fidelity torque measurements are crucial for proper joint torque control. Commercially available torque sensors are expensive and often hard to integrate into compact and light-weight robot leg designs. Custom-made sensors on the other hand often suffer from asymmetric behaviour with respect to direction of rotation or poor linearity, especially for small and compact applications. This work is motivated by the need to achieve reliable torque measurements for the newly developed, small-size hydraulically actuated quadruped robot MiniHyQ. The main contribution of this work is the development of a new innovative design of a strain gauge based torque sensor with a high degree of linearity, symmetry, and scalability (both in dimension and measuring range). Furthermore, the glueing and wiring of the strain gauges are easy thanks to the geometry of the sensor that allows direct access to the mounting surfaces, even in compact dimensions. We show the design’s symmetric (clockwise and counterclockwise rotation) and linear behaviour through virtual prototyping and experimental tests. Furthermore, we show how a small-scale instance of the sensor design is successfully installed on the MiniHyQ robot.