Learning Contact Representation for Leg Odometry
This paper proposes a self-supervised representation learning framework for contact detection in legged robots using only joint encoders, eliminating the need for force sensors. It outperforms supervised and baseline methods and provides public code.
[2606.05501] Learning Contact Representation for Leg Odometry
[Submitted on 3 Jun 2026]
Title:Learning Contact Representation for Leg Odometry
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Abstract:The estimation of odometry in legged robots depends on the assumption that the velocity of the foot with respect to the world remains zero during the stance phase. Feedback for the main body velocity is derived from the kinematic serial chain of the feet making accurate leg phase detection is a critical subproblem. A considerable number of studies employ ground reaction force sensors mounted at the tip of the foot to classify, yet these sensors may not be universally available for all legged robots. Additionally, these sensors are often unresponsive to unaccounted disturbances, such as slippage, while the foot remains in contact with the ground. In this study, we propose a self-supervised representation learning framework for contact detection that utilizes the standard sensor set of joint encoders without reliance on force sensor augmentations. We employ learned representations to model the stance and swing phases probabilistically. The experimental results obtained confirm the efficacy of the proposed self-supervised contact detector. Our framework exhibited superior performance in comparison to supervised methods which necessitate sensor set augmentation and labeling, as well as baseline probabilistic approaches. Additionally, we make our code available to the public.
Comments: 17 pages
Subjects:
Robotics (cs.RO)
Cite as: arXiv:2606.05501 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2606.05501v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.05501
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Emre Girgin [view email] [v1] Wed, 3 Jun 2026 22:50:45 UTC (8,938 KB)
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