Special issue on whole-body control of contacts and dynamics for humanoid robots

Autonomous Robots, Jan 2016

Serena Ivaldi, Jan Babič, Michael Mistry, Robin Murphy

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Special issue on whole-body control of contacts and dynamics for humanoid robots

Auton Robot Special issue on whole-body control of contacts and dynamics for humanoid robots Serena Ivaldi 0 1 2 3 4 Jan Babicˇ 0 1 2 3 4 Michael Mistry 0 1 2 3 4 Robin Murphy 0 1 2 3 4 0 Robin Murphy 1 Michael Mistry 2 Texas A&M University, College Station , USA 3 University of Birmingham , Birmingham , UK 4 Jožef Stefan Institute , Ljubljana , Slovenia Whether you are walking on a concrete floor, standing on a carpet, or sitting on a soft chair, your entire body continuously controls the posture and the contact forces that are produced by acting on rigid and compliant surfaces. Sometimes, like when reaching for a distant object or standing inside a moving bus that suddenly brakes, humans plan intentionally new contacts to preserve their balance and avoid falling. For humanoid robots to act in unstructured natural environments as humans do, contacts and physical interactions are necessary and unavoidable. In recent years, whole-body control techniques have matured to the point where various humanoid robots can robustly interact with their environment. Robots may exploit predictable contacts to aid in goal achievement, as well as learn dynamics of contact to generalize over novel tasks and domains. They may regulate their compliance to cope with unpredictable contacts and ensure safe behaviors. While these achievements are a major milestone for robotics, they still need to be applied to more challenging situations, inspired by natural settings and physical interaction scenarios. There is a strong need for advanced methods that can handle multiple contacts, unforeseen or - intentional, with different rigidity properties, and guarantee the robust, autonomous execution of actions (balancing, walking, manipulation) in variable contexts. Such a need has never been as evident as was in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), an international competition funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. During the DRC, several international teams were remotely controlling a semi-autonomous humanoid robot to perform whole-body tasks that involved contacts, such as walking, driving a car and climbing stairs. The DRC spurred the development of new humanoid robots and advances in both mechanical design, hardware and software development. Independently of the DRC, many projects addressing control of contacts were funded by the European Commission, such as CODYCO,1 COGIMON2 and WALKMAN.3 The latter was also instrumental to the design and building of the homonym humanoid robot that participated to the DRC. This increased interest for whole-body control has also become apparent through the proliferation of several international workshops at the most important robotics conferences, such as the well attended workshop “Whole-body Compliant Dynamical Contacts for Humanoid Robotics” at ICRA 2013 in Karlsruhe, Germany.4 Several workshops followed up, such as the “Torque-Controlled Humanoids” in HUMANOIDS 20135 and the workshop “Towards a Unifying Framework for Whole-body and Manipulation Control” in RSS 2015.6 1 http://www.codyco.eu/. 2 http://cogimon.eu/. 3 http://www.walk-man.eu/. 4 http://www.codyco.eu/index.php/workshop-icra2013. 5 http://www.codyco.eu/index.php/workshop-humanoids2013. 6 http://www.codyco.eu/index.php/45-workshop-rss2015. This special issue of the Autonomous Robots journal aims at presenting the advances in whole-body control of real robots, focusing on control and learning techniques applied to estimation, control and adaptation of whole-body dynamics movement and contact forces that go beyond basic balancing abilities. The special issue received the support of the IEEERAS Technical Committee in Whole-Body Control through advertisement on its website.7 Papers were solicited with an open call that was advertised about six months before the deadline. A deadline extension was then allowed, as many authors were still engaged in the DRC. We received more than thirty submissions to the special issue, which were rigorously reviewed by up to four reviewers, as well as by at least one of the guest editors. Eight papers were selected for this special issue. We consciously decided to narrow the impressive pool of submissions to those papers which presented relevant research and success stories with real robotics platforms, shown in Fig. 1. The paper “Optimization-based locomotion planning, estimation and control design for the Atlas humanoid robot” by Kuindersma et al., presents an overview of the optimization algorithms for planning and control that were developed for their Atlas robot competing in the DRC. Particularly, they describe a sparse nonlinear trajectory optimization algorithm that combines full body kinematics with centroidal dynamics to efficiently compute whole-body motions in presence of multiple contacts. Their controller relies on reduced dynamical models to construct an efficiently-solvable quadratic programming problem with active-sets, which is able to achieve stable walking and (...truncated)


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Serena Ivaldi, Jan Babič, Michael Mistry, Robin Murphy. Special issue on whole-body control of contacts and dynamics for humanoid robots, Autonomous Robots, 2016, pp. 425-428, Volume 40, Issue 3, DOI: 10.1007/s10514-016-9545-5