  Legged robots have great potential to perform loco-manipulation tasks, yet it
is challenging to keep the robot balanced while it interacts with the
environment. In this paper we study the use of additional contact points for
maximising the robustness of loco-manipulation motions. Specifically,
body-ground contact is studied for enhancing robustness and manipulation
capabilities of quadrupedal robots. We propose to equip the robot with prongs:
small legs rigidly attached to the body which ensure body-ground contact occurs
in controllable point-contacts. The effect of these prongs on robustness is
quantified by computing the Smallest Unrejectable Force (SUF), a measure of
robustness related to Feasible Wrench Polytopes. We apply the SUF to assess the
robustness of the system, and propose an effective approximation of the SUF
that can be computed at near-real-time speed. We design a hierarchical
quadratic programming based whole-body controller that controls stable
interaction when the prongs are in contact with the ground. This novel concept
of using prongs and the resulting control framework are all implemented on
hardware to validate the effectiveness of the increased robustness and newly
enabled loco-manipulation tasks, such as obstacle clearance and manipulation of
a large object.
