Passive–Active Cooperative Design Method for Fall Protection in Humanoid Robot

Abstract

Humanoid robots are highly susceptible to structural damage during irrecoverable falls due to high landing velocity, short impact duration, and high peak impact force. Inspired by human protective strategies, namely instinctive postural adjustment and soft-tissue energy absorption, this paper proposes a passive–active cooperative fall-protection method that combines pre-impact motion regulation with post-impact structural energy absorption. On the passive protection side, high-risk contact regions are identified through multi-directional fall simulations, and a multi-region, multilayer protective suit is optimized considering impact energy absorption, peak-force reduction, anti-bottoming safety, added mass, and thickness constraints. On the active protection side, a variable height inverted pendulum (VHIP) model is used to optimize the center of pressure and center of mass trajectories, reducing the terminal impact energy before ground contact. The residual impact energy is then matched with the absorption capacity of the passive protective layers, forming a unified framework that integrates pre-impact motion unloading and post-impact energy absorption. Numerical validation is performed on a MATLAB–CoppeliaSim co-simulation platform, and physical experiments are conducted on the FCR humanoid robot (approx. 50 kg, 1.65 m, 22 DOF). Compared with the unprotected case, the proposed method reduces the peak equivalent impact force from 4819.1 N to 1038.2 N, i.e., a reduction of 78.5%, demonstrating its effectiveness in attenuating impact loads and enhancing protection capability.