Modeling and control of humanoid robots in dynamic environments: ICub balancing on a seesaw

Abstract

Forthcoming applications concerning humanoid robots may involve physical interaction between the robot and a dynamic environment. In such scenario, classical balancing and walking controllers that neglect the environment dynamics may not be sufficient for achieving a stable robot behavior. This paper presents a modeling and control framework for balancing humanoid robots in contact with a dynamic environment. We first model the robot and environment dynamics, together with the contact constraints. Then, a control strategy for stabilizing the full system is proposed. Theoretical results are verified in simulation with robot iCub balancing on a seesaw.

Torque and velocity controllers to perform jumps with a humanoid robot: theory and implementation on the iCub robot

“…The execution of jumps on the robot required a low level improvement of the robot hardware and software. Nevertheless, we struggled to overcame the hardware faults due to excessive peak currents, and the low level torque control, that has shown very good performances with balancing [16] and interaction tasks, needs to be improved. The importance of controlling and having a null angular momentum is pointed out through simulations and experiments.…”

Simultaneous Floating-Base Estimation of Human Kinematics and Joint Torques

“…The floating-base formalism is not a novelty in the robotics research and it has been used for multiple topics for years. Inverse dynamics control for humanoids and legged robots [8], modeling and control of humanoids in dynamic environments [9], identification of humanoids inertial parameters [10,11], are only a few examples of applications. In [12,13], the formalism has been even used in the context of human–robot experiments.…”