Each joint of hydraulic drive legged robot adopts highly integrated electro-hydraulic servo system, and the system has two common forms, namely, valve-controlled cylinder system and pump-controlled cylinder system. The former has a large energy loss, which restricts the endurance of the legged robot in the field. Although the latter has the advantages of energy saving and high efficiency, the overall response ability of control system is unsatisfied. In this paper, a novel pump-valve compound drive system (PCDS) is designed. It combines the advantages of pump-controlled cylinder system and valve-controlled cylinder system, which can not only effectively reduce the energy loss of the system, but also ensure the electro-hydraulic servo system of the robot joint has the ideal response ability. This paper consists of three parts. In the first part, the mathematical model of nonlinear force control of PCDS is established, which takes into account the pressure-flow nonlinearity of servo valve, the asymmetry of servo cylinder and the complexity and variability of load. So this model has a high accuracy. In the second part, On the basis of the above model, a force control method combining tracking error compensation and load compensation control is designed. And this control method can improve the control accuracy of the robot. In the third part, the performance of the designed control method is verified by experiments. The experiments show that the designed force control method can effectively reduce the influence of external position disturbance on the tracking accuracy of the force control system and improve the control accuracy of the robot joint movement.

Pulse number modulation (PNM) combined with pulse width modulation (PWM) control is an effective solution to improve the resolution of digital valve systems. However, the numerous discrete variables that use parallel on / off valves cause difficult control coordination and uneven switching. To address this issue, this article defines the equivalent spool displacement of the digital flow control unit by the number of PNM-controlled valves and the duty cycle of PWM-controlled valves to replace multiple discrete variables and develops the equivalent continuous metering control method. Furthermore, a uniform switching control strategy is proposed for the PWM-controlled valve using a uniformly distributed permutation for each on / off valve. The proposed control methods are verified by simulation on the built mathematical model of the equal-coded digital valve system. Experimental results for the displacement control of a hydraulic cylinder at 1 rad/s show that the average error of the equivalent continuous metering control is about 0.236 mm and the dispersion index reaches 20%, while the uniform switching control strategy achieves 80% with an average error of 0.215 mm. Simulated and experimental results demonstrate that the equivalent continuous metering control with a uniform switching strategy can almost evenly distribute switching numbers without compromising the accuracy of the displacement control.