Intelligent Systems
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Balancing experiments on a torque-controlled humanoid with hierarchical inverse dynamics

2014

Conference Paper

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Recently several hierarchical inverse dynamics controllers based on cascades of quadratic programs have been proposed for application on torque controlled robots. They have important theoretical benefits but have never been implemented on a torque controlled robot where model inaccuracies and real-time computation requirements can be problematic. In this contribution we present an experimental evaluation of these algorithms in the context of balance control for a humanoid robot. The presented experiments demonstrate the applicability of the approach under real robot conditions (i.e. model uncertainty, estimation errors, etc). We propose a simplification of the optimization problem that allows us to decrease computation time enough to implement it in a fast torque control loop. We implement a momentum-based balance controller which shows robust performance in face of unknown disturbances, even when the robot is standing on only one foot. In a second experiment, a tracking task is evaluated to demonstrate the performance of the controller with more complicated hierarchies. Our results show that hierarchical inverse dynamics controllers can be used for feedback control of humanoid robots and that momentum-based balance control can be efficiently implemented on a real robot.

Author(s): Herzog, A. and Righetti, L. and Grimminger, F and Pastor, P. and Schaal, S.
Book Title: 2014 IEEE/RSJ Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
Pages: 981--988
Year: 2014
Publisher: IEEE

Department(s): Autonomous Motion, Movement Generation and Control
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (inproceedings)

DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2014.6942678

Address: Chicago, USA
URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.2042

BibTex

@inproceedings{herzog_balancing_2014,
  title = {Balancing experiments on a torque-controlled humanoid with hierarchical inverse dynamics},
  author = {Herzog, A. and Righetti, L. and Grimminger, F and Pastor, P. and Schaal, S.},
  booktitle = {2014 {IEEE}/{RSJ} {Conference} on {Intelligent} {Robots} and {Systems}},
  pages = {981--988},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  address = {Chicago, USA},
  year = {2014},
  doi = {10.1109/IROS.2014.6942678},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.2042}
}