Alexander Herzog

Anthony Brohan, Noah Brown, Justice Carbajal et al. · stanford

We study how vision-language models trained on Internet-scale data can be incorporated directly into end-to-end robotic control to boost generalization and enable emergent semantic reasoning. Our goal is to enable a single end-to-end trained model to both learn to map robot observations to actions and enjoy the benefits of large-scale pretraining on language and vision-language data from the web. To this end, we propose to co-fine-tune state-of-the-art vision-language models on both robotic trajectory data and Internet-scale vision-language tasks, such as visual question answering. In contrast to other approaches, we propose a simple, general recipe to achieve this goal: in order to fit both natural language responses and robotic actions into the same format, we express the actions as text tokens and incorporate them directly into the training set of the model in the same way as natural language tokens. We refer to such category of models as vision-language-action models (VLA) and instantiate an example of such a model, which we call RT-2. Our extensive evaluation (6k evaluation trials) shows that our approach leads to performant robotic policies and enables RT-2 to obtain a range of emergent capabilities from Internet-scale training. This includes significantly improved generalization to novel objects, the ability to interpret commands not present in the robot training data (such as placing an object onto a particular number or icon), and the ability to perform rudimentary reasoning in response to user commands (such as picking up the smallest or largest object, or the one closest to another object). We further show that incorporating chain of thought reasoning allows RT-2 to perform multi-stage semantic reasoning, for example figuring out which object to pick up for use as an improvised hammer (a rock), or which type of drink is best suited for someone who is tired (an energy drink).

Yevgen Chebotar, Quan Vuong, Alex Irpan et al.

In this work, we present a scalable reinforcement learning method for training multi-task policies from large offline datasets that can leverage both human demonstrations and autonomously collected data. Our method uses a Transformer to provide a scalable representation for Q-functions trained via offline temporal difference backups. We therefore refer to the method as Q-Transformer. By discretizing each action dimension and representing the Q-value of each action dimension as separate tokens, we can apply effective high-capacity sequence modeling techniques for Q-learning. We present several design decisions that enable good performance with offline RL training, and show that Q-Transformer outperforms prior offline RL algorithms and imitation learning techniques on a large diverse real-world robotic manipulation task suite. The project's website and videos can be found at https://qtransformer.github.io

ALOHA 2 Team, Jorge Aldaco, Travis Armstrong et al.

Diverse demonstration datasets have powered significant advances in robot learning, but the dexterity and scale of such data can be limited by the hardware cost, the hardware robustness, and the ease of teleoperation. We introduce ALOHA 2, an enhanced version of ALOHA that has greater performance, ergonomics, and robustness compared to the original design. To accelerate research in large-scale bimanual manipulation, we open source all hardware designs of ALOHA 2 with a detailed tutorial, together with a MuJoCo model of ALOHA 2 with system identification. See the project website at aloha-2.github.io.

Aliai Eusebi, Alexander Herzog, Xiaoyu Liang et al.

The maximum softmax probability (MSP) represents a default approach when evaluating uncertainty quantification for language model generation with structured output. Although cheap, it is often miscalibrated. Methods that probe the model's internal activations feed raw hidden states into opaque classifiers, reading activations as static snapshots and leaving implicit the layer-wise trajectory by which a representation is formed. Yet, similar endpoints can arise from very different paths, and how evidence accumulates, reinforces, or reverses across depth might reveal uncertainty that final probabilities obscure. We extract eleven scale-invariant geometric features, tracing the cumulative path of per-layer MLP updates, and feed them to a sparse linear probe. The probe outperforms MSP under selective abstention, with gains scaling with baseline miscalibration up to 21 AURC points. Because every feature has a closed-form geometric meaning, the probe's coefficients trace how and where along depth errors take shape -- which layers commit prematurely, which contradict the running state, where trajectories drift away from their endpoint.

Justin Sybrandt, Angelo Carrabba, Alexander Herzog et al.

The potential for automatic hypothesis generation (HG) systems to improve research productivity keeps pace with the growing set of publicly available scientific information. But as data becomes easier to acquire, we must understand the effect different textual data sources have on our resulting hypotheses. Are abstracts enough for HG, or does it need full-text papers? How many papers does an HG system need to make valuable predictions? How sensitive is a general-purpose HG system to hyperparameter values or input quality? What effect does corpus size and document length have on HG results? To answer these questions we train multiple versions of knowledge network-based HG system, Moliere, on varying corpora in order to compare challenges and trade offs in terms of result quality and computational requirements. Moliere generalizes main principles of similar knowledge network-based HG systems and reinforces them with topic modeling components. The corpora include the abstract and full-text versions of PubMed Central, as well as iterative halves of MEDLINE, which allows us to compare the effect document length and count has on the results. We find that, quantitatively, corpora with a higher median document length result in marginally higher quality results, yet require substantially longer to process. However, qualitatively, full-length papers introduce a significant number of intruder terms to the resulting topics, which decreases human interpretability. Additionally, we find that the effect of document length is greater than that of document count, even if both sets contain only paper abstracts. Reproducibility: Our code and data are available at github.com/jsybran/moliere, and bit.ly/2GxghpM respectively.

Alexander Herzog, Aliai Eusebi, Lorenzo Cavallaro

The performance figures of modern drift-adaptive malware classifiers appear promising, but does this translate to genuine operational reliability? The standard evaluation paradigm primarily focuses on baseline performance metrics, neglecting confidence-error alignment and operational stability. While TESSERACT established the importance of temporal evaluation, we take a complementary direction by investigating whether malware classifiers maintain reliable and stable confidence estimates under distribution shifts and exploring the tensions between scientific advancement and practical impacts when they do not. We propose AURORA, a framework to evaluate malware classifiers based on their confidence quality and operational resilience. AURORA subjects the confidence profile of a given model to verification to assess the reliability of its estimates. Unreliable confidence estimates erode operational trust, waste valuable annotation budget on non-informative samples for active learning, and leave error-prone instances undetected in selective classification. AURORA is complemented by a set of metrics designed to go beyond point-in-time performance, striving towards a more holistic assessment of operational stability throughout temporal evaluation periods. The fragility in SOTA frameworks across datasets of varying drift suggests the need for a return to the whiteboard.

Alexander Herzog, Robbie Southam, Ioannis Mavromatis et al.

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning approach that enables training on decentralized data while preserving privacy. However, FL systems often involve resource-constrained client devices with limited computational power, memory, storage, and bandwidth. This paper introduces FedMap, a novel method that aims to enhance the communication efficiency of FL deployments by collaboratively learning an increasingly sparse global model through iterative, unstructured pruning. Importantly, FedMap trains a global model from scratch, unlike other methods reported in the literature, making it ideal for privacy-critical use cases such as in the medical and finance domains, where suitable pre-training data is often limited. FedMap adapts iterative magnitude-based pruning to the FL setting, ensuring all clients prune and refine the same subset of the global model parameters, therefore gradually reducing the global model size and communication overhead. The iterative nature of FedMap, forming subsequent models as subsets of predecessors, avoids parameter reactivation issues seen in prior work, resulting in stable performance. In this paper we provide an extensive evaluation of FedMap across diverse settings, datasets, model architectures, and hyperparameters, assessing performance in both IID and non-IID environments. Comparative analysis against the baseline approach demonstrates FedMap's ability to achieve more stable client model performance. For IID scenarios, FedMap achieves over $90$\% pruning without significant performance degradation. In non-IID settings, it achieves at least $~80$\% pruning while maintaining accuracy. FedMap offers a promising solution to alleviate communication bottlenecks in FL systems while retaining model accuracy.

Farah Alshanik, Amy Apon, Yuheng Du et al.

Query expansion is the process of reformulating the original query by adding relevant words. Choosing which terms to add in order to improve the performance of the query expansion methods or to enhance the quality of the retrieved results is an important aspect of any information retrieval system. Adding words that can positively impact the quality of the search query or are informative enough play an important role in returning or gathering relevant documents that cover a certain topic can result in improving the efficiency of the information retrieval system. Typically, query expansion techniques are used to add or substitute words to a given search query to collect relevant data. In this paper, we design and implement a pipeline of automated query expansion. We outline several tools using different methods to expand the query. Our methods depend on targeting emergent events in streaming data over time and finding the hidden topics from targeted documents using probabilistic topic models. We employ Dynamic Eigenvector Centrality to trigger the emergent events, and the Latent Dirichlet Allocation to discover the topics. Also, we use an external data source as a secondary stream to supplement the primary stream with relevant words and expand the query using the words from both primary and secondary streams. An experimental study is performed on Twitter data (primary stream) related to the events that happened during protests in Baltimore in 2015. The quality of the retrieved results was measured using a quality indicator of the streaming data: tweets count, hashtag count, and hashtag clustering.

Yao Lu, Karol Hausman, Yevgen Chebotar et al.

Robotic skills can be learned via imitation learning (IL) using user-provided demonstrations, or via reinforcement learning (RL) using large amountsof autonomously collected experience.Both methods have complementarystrengths and weaknesses: RL can reach a high level of performance, but requiresexploration, which can be very time consuming and unsafe; IL does not requireexploration, but only learns skills that are as good as the provided demonstrations.Can a single method combine the strengths of both approaches? A number ofprior methods have aimed to address this question, proposing a variety of tech-niques that integrate elements of IL and RL. However, scaling up such methodsto complex robotic skills that integrate diverse offline data and generalize mean-ingfully to real-world scenarios still presents a major challenge. In this paper, ouraim is to test the scalability of prior IL + RL algorithms and devise a system basedon detailed empirical experimentation that combines existing components in themost effective and scalable way. To that end, we present a series of experimentsaimed at understanding the implications of each design decision, so as to develop acombined approach that can utilize demonstrations and heterogeneous prior datato attain the best performance on a range of real-world and realistic simulatedrobotic problems. Our complete method, which we call AW-Opt, combines ele-ments of advantage-weighted regression [1, 2] and QT-Opt [3], providing a unifiedapproach for integrating demonstrations and offline data for robotic manipulation.Please see https://awopt.github.io for more details.

Zhuo Xu, Wenhao Yu, Alexander Herzog et al.

General contact-rich manipulation problems are long-standing challenges in robotics due to the difficulty of understanding complicated contact physics. Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great potential in solving robot manipulation tasks. However, existing RL policies have limited adaptability to environments with diverse dynamics properties, which is pivotal in solving many contact-rich manipulation tasks. In this work, we propose Contact-aware Online COntext Inference (COCOI), a deep RL method that encodes a context embedding of dynamics properties online using contact-rich interactions. We study this method based on a novel and challenging non-planar pushing task, where the robot uses a monocular camera image and wrist force torque sensor reading to push an object to a goal location while keeping it upright. We run extensive experiments to demonstrate the capability of COCOI in a wide range of settings and dynamics properties in simulation, and also in a sim-to-real transfer scenario on a real robot (Video: https://youtu.be/nrmJYksh1Kc)

Farah Alshanik, Amy Apon, Alexander Herzog et al.

Text preprocessing is an essential step in text mining. Removing words that can negatively impact the quality of prediction algorithms or are not informative enough is a crucial storage-saving technique in text indexing and results in improved computational efficiency. Typically, a generic stop word list is applied to a dataset regardless of the domain. However, many common words are different from one domain to another but have no significance within a particular domain. Eliminating domain-specific common words in a corpus reduces the dimensionality of the feature space, and improves the performance of text mining tasks. In this paper, we present a novel mathematical approach for the automatic extraction of domain-specific words called the hyperplane-based approach. This new approach depends on the notion of low dimensional representation of the word in vector space and its distance from hyperplane. The hyperplane-based approach can significantly reduce text dimensionality by eliminating irrelevant features. We compare the hyperplane-based approach with other feature selection methods, namely \c{hi}2 and mutual information. An experimental study is performed on three different datasets and five classification algorithms, and measure the dimensionality reduction and the increase in the classification performance. Results indicate that the hyperplane-based approach can reduce the dimensionality of the corpus by 90% and outperforms mutual information. The computational time to identify the domain-specific words is significantly lower than mutual information.

Ted Xiao, Eric Jang, Dmitry Kalashnikov et al.

We study reinforcement learning in settings where sampling an action from the policy must be done concurrently with the time evolution of the controlled system, such as when a robot must decide on the next action while still performing the previous action. Much like a person or an animal, the robot must think and move at the same time, deciding on its next action before the previous one has completed. In order to develop an algorithmic framework for such concurrent control problems, we start with a continuous-time formulation of the Bellman equations, and then discretize them in a way that is aware of system delays. We instantiate this new class of approximate dynamic programming methods via a simple architectural extension to existing value-based deep reinforcement learning algorithms. We evaluate our methods on simulated benchmark tasks and a large-scale robotic grasping task where the robot must "think while moving".

Dmitry Kalashnikov, Alex Irpan, Peter Pastor et al.

In this paper, we study the problem of learning vision-based dynamic manipulation skills using a scalable reinforcement learning approach. We study this problem in the context of grasping, a longstanding challenge in robotic manipulation. In contrast to static learning behaviors that choose a grasp point and then execute the desired grasp, our method enables closed-loop vision-based control, whereby the robot continuously updates its grasp strategy based on the most recent observations to optimize long-horizon grasp success. To that end, we introduce QT-Opt, a scalable self-supervised vision-based reinforcement learning framework that can leverage over 580k real-world grasp attempts to train a deep neural network Q-function with over 1.2M parameters to perform closed-loop, real-world grasping that generalizes to 96% grasp success on unseen objects. Aside from attaining a very high success rate, our method exhibits behaviors that are quite distinct from more standard grasping systems: using only RGB vision-based perception from an over-the-shoulder camera, our method automatically learns regrasping strategies, probes objects to find the most effective grasps, learns to reposition objects and perform other non-prehensile pre-grasp manipulations, and responds dynamically to disturbances and perturbations.

Alexander Herzog, Peter John, Slava Jankin Mikhaylov

Topic models are widely used in natural language processing, allowing researchers to estimate the underlying themes in a collection of documents. Most topic models use unsupervised methods and hence require the additional step of attaching meaningful labels to estimated topics. This process of manual labeling is not scalable and suffers from human bias. We present a semi-automatic transfer topic labeling method that seeks to remedy these problems. Domain-specific codebooks form the knowledge-base for automated topic labeling. We demonstrate our approach with a dynamic topic model analysis of the complete corpus of UK House of Commons speeches 1935-2014, using the coding instructions of the Comparative Agendas Project to label topics. We show that our method works well for a majority of the topics we estimate; but we also find that institution-specific topics, in particular on subnational governance, require manual input. We validate our results using human expert coding.

Julian Viereck, Jules Kozolinsky, Alexander Herzog et al.

In this work we present a method for learning a reactive policy for a simple dynamic locomotion task involving hard impact and switching contacts where we assume the contact location and contact timing to be unknown. To learn such a policy, we use optimal control to optimize a local controller for a fixed environment and contacts. We learn the contact-rich dynamics for our underactuated systems along these trajectories in a sample efficient manner. We use the optimized policies to learn the reactive policy in form of a neural network. Using a new neural network architecture, we are able to preserve more information from the local policy and make its output interpretable in the sense that its output in terms of desired trajectories, feedforward commands and gains can be interpreted. Extensive simulations demonstrate the robustness of the approach to changing environments, outperforming a model-free gradient policy based methods on the same tasks in simulation. Finally, we show that the learned policy can be robustly transferred on a real robot.

Brahayam Ponton, Alexander Herzog, Andrea Del Prete et al.

Recently, the centroidal momentum dynamics has received substantial attention to plan dynamically consistent motions for robots with arms and legs in multi-contact scenarios. However, it is also non convex which renders any optimization approach difficult and timing is usually kept fixed in most trajectory optimization techniques to not introduce additional non convexities to the problem. But this can limit the versatility of the algorithms. In our previous work, we proposed a convex relaxation of the problem that allowed to efficiently compute momentum trajectories and contact forces. However, our approach could not minimize a desired angular momentum objective which seriously limited its applicability. Noticing that the non-convexity introduced by the time variables is of similar nature as the centroidal dynamics one, we propose two convex relaxations to the problem based on trust regions and soft constraints. The resulting approaches can compute time-optimized dynamically consistent trajectories sufficiently fast to make the approach realtime capable. The performance of the algorithm is demonstrated in several multi-contact scenarios for a humanoid robot. In particular, we show that the proposed convex relaxation of the original problem finds solutions that are consistent with the original non-convex problem and illustrate how timing optimization allows to find motion plans that would be difficult to plan with fixed timing.

Alexander Herzog, Slava J. Mikhaylov

We present a database of parliamentary debates that contains the complete record of parliamentary speeches from Dáil Éireann, the lower house and principal chamber of the Irish parliament, from 1919 to 2013. In addition, the database contains background information on all TDs (Teachta Dála, members of parliament), such as their party affiliations, constituencies and office positions. The current version of the database includes close to 4.5 million speeches from 1,178 TDs. The speeches were downloaded from the official parliament website and further processed and parsed with a Python script. Background information on TDs was collected from the member database of the parliament website. Data on cabinet positions (ministers and junior ministers) was collected from the official website of the government. A record linkage algorithm and human coders were used to match TDs and ministers.

Majid Khadiv, S. Ali A. Moosavian, Alexander Herzog et al.

In this paper, we extend state of the art Model Predictive Control (MPC) approaches to generate safe bipedal walking on slippery surfaces. In this setting, we formulate walking as a trade off between realizing a desired walking velocity and preserving robust foot-ground contact. Exploiting this formulation inside MPC, we show that safe walking on various flat terrains can be achieved by compromising three main attributes, i. e. walking velocity tracking, the Zero Moment Point (ZMP) modulation, and the Required Coefficient of Friction (RCoF) regulation. Simulation results show that increasing the walking velocity increases the possibility of slippage, while reducing the slippage possibility conflicts with reducing the tip-over possibility of the contact and vice versa.

Majid Khadiv, Alexander Herzog, S. Ali A. Moosavian et al.

Step adjustment can improve the gait robustness of biped robots, however the adaptation of step timing is often neglected as it gives rise to non-convex problems when optimized over several footsteps. In this paper, we argue that it is not necessary to optimize walking over several steps to ensure gait viability and show that it is sufficient to merely select the next step timing and location. Using this insight, we propose a novel walking pattern generator that optimally selects step location and timing at every control cycle. Our approach is computationally simple compared to standard approaches in the literature, yet guarantees that any viable state will remain viable in the future. We propose a swing foot adaptation strategy and integrate the pattern generator with an inverse dynamics controller that does not explicitly control the center of mass nor the foot center of pressure. This is particularly useful for biped robots with limited control authority over their foot center of pressure, such as robots with point feet or passive ankles. Extensive simulations on a humanoid robot with passive ankles demonstrate the capabilities of the approach in various walking situations, including external pushes and foot slippage, and emphasize the importance of step timing adaptation to stabilize walking.

Chris Gropp, Alexander Herzog, Ilya Safro et al.

Topic modeling, a method for extracting the underlying themes from a collection of documents, is an increasingly important component of the design of intelligent systems enabling the sense-making of highly dynamic and diverse streams of text data. Traditional methods such as Dynamic Topic Modeling (DTM) do not lend themselves well to direct parallelization because of dependencies from one time step to another. In this paper, we introduce and empirically analyze Clustered Latent Dirichlet Allocation (CLDA), a method for extracting dynamic latent topics from a collection of documents. Our approach is based on data decomposition in which the data is partitioned into segments, followed by topic modeling on the individual segments. The resulting local models are then combined into a global solution using clustering. The decomposition and resulting parallelization leads to very fast runtime even on very large datasets. Our approach furthermore provides insight into how the composition of topics changes over time and can also be applied using other data partitioning strategies over any discrete features of the data, such as geographic features or classes of users. In this paper CLDA is applied successfully to seventeen years of NIPS conference papers (2,484 documents and 3,280,697 words), seventeen years of computer science journal abstracts (533,560 documents and 32,551,540 words), and to forty years of the PubMed corpus (4,025,978 documents and 273,853,980 words).

Neela Avudaiappan, Alexander Herzog, Sneha Kadam et al.

Methods for detecting and summarizing emergent keywords have been extensively studied since social media and microblogging activities have started to play an important role in data analysis and decision making. We present a system for monitoring emergent keywords and summarizing a document stream based on the dynamic semantic graphs of streaming documents. We introduce the notion of dynamic eigenvector centrality for ranking emergent keywords, and present an algorithm for summarizing emergent events that is based on the minimum weight set cover. We demonstrate our system with an analysis of streaming Twitter data related to public security events.

Majid Khadiv, Alexander Herzog, S. Ali. A. Moosavian et al.

Step adjustment for humanoid robots has been shown to improve robustness in gaits. However, step duration adaptation is often neglected in control strategies. In this paper, we propose an approach that combines both step location and timing adjustment for generating robust gaits. In this approach, step location and step timing are decided, based on feedback from the current state of the robot. The proposed approach is comprised of two stages. In the first stage, the nominal step location and step duration for the next step or a previewed number of steps are specified. In this stage which is done at the start of each step, the main goal is to specify the best step length and step duration for a desired walking speed. The second stage deals with finding the best landing point and landing time of the swing foot at each control cycle. In this stage, stability of the gaits is preserved by specifying a desired offset between the swing foot landing point and the Divergent Component of Motion (DCM) at the end of current step. After specifying the landing point of the swing foot at a desired time, the swing foot trajectory is regenerated at each control cycle to realize desired landing properties. Simulation on different scenarios shows the robustness of the generated gaits from our proposed approach compared to the case where no timing adjustment is employed.

Majid Khadiv, Sebastien Kleff, Alexander Herzog et al.

In this paper, a method for stabilizing biped robots stepping by a combination of Divergent Component of Motion (DCM) tracking and step adjustment is proposed. In this method, the DCM trajectory is generated, consistent with the predefined footprints. Furthermore, a swing foot trajectory modification strategy is proposed to adapt the landing point, using DCM measurement. In order to apply the generated trajectories to the full robot, a Hierarchical Inverse Dynamics (HID) is employed. The HID enables us to use different combinations of the DCM tracking and step adjustment for stabilizing different biped robots. Simulation experiments on two scenarios for two different simulated robots, one with active ankles and the other with passive ankles, are carried out. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for robots with both active and passive ankles.

Brahayam Ponton, Alexander Herzog, Stefan Schaal et al.

Linear models for control and motion generation of humanoid robots have received significant attention in the past years, not only due to their well known theoretical guarantees, but also because of practical computational advantages. However, to tackle more challenging tasks and scenarios such as locomotion on uneven terrain, a more expressive model is required. In this paper, we are interested in contact interaction-centered motion optimization based on the momentum dynamics model. This model is non-linear and non-convex; however, we find a relaxation of the problem that allows us to formulate it as a single convex quadratically-constrained quadratic program (QCQP) that can be very efficiently optimized. Furthermore, experimental results suggest that this relaxation is tight and therefore useful for multi-contact planning. This convex model is then coupled to the optimization of end-effector contacts location using a mixed integer program, which can be solved in realtime. This becomes relevant e.g. to recover from external pushes, where a predefined stepping plan is likely to fail and an online adaptation of the contact location is needed. The performance of our algorithm is demonstrated in several multi-contact scenarios for humanoid robot.

Alexander Herzog, Stefan Schaal, Ludovic Righetti

Optimal control approaches in combination with trajectory optimization have recently proven to be a promising control strategy for legged robots. Computationally efficient and robust algorithms were derived using simplified models of the contact interaction between robot and environment such as the linear inverted pendulum model (LIPM). However, as humanoid robots enter more complex environments, less restrictive models become increasingly important. As we leave the regime of linear models, we need to build dedicated solvers that can compute interaction forces together with consistent kinematic plans for the whole-body. In this paper, we address the problem of planning robot motion and interaction forces for legged robots given predefined contact surfaces. The motion generation process is decomposed into two alternating parts computing force and motion plans in coherence. We focus on the properties of the momentum computation leading to sparse optimal control formulations to be exploited by a dedicated solver. In our experiments, we demonstrate that our motion generation algorithm computes consistent contact forces and joint trajectories for our humanoid robot. We also demonstrate the favorable time complexity due to our formulation and composition of the momentum equations.

Stefano Gurciullo, Michael Smallegan, María Pereda et al.

This study is a first, exploratory attempt to use quantitative semantics techniques and topological analysis to analyze systemic patterns arising in a complex political system. In particular, we use a rich data set covering all speeches and debates in the UK House of Commons between 1975 and 2014. By the use of dynamic topic modeling (DTM) and topological data analysis (TDA) we show that both members and parties feature specific roles within the system, consistent over time, and extract global patterns indicating levels of political cohesion. Our results provide a wide array of novel hypotheses about the complex dynamics of political systems, with valuable policy applications.

Nicholas Rotella, Alexander Herzog, Stefan Schaal et al.

This work presents approaches for the estimation of quantities important for the control of the momentum of a humanoid robot. In contrast to previous approaches which use simplified models such as the Linear Inverted Pendulum Model, we present estimators based on the momentum dynamics of the robot. By using this simple yet dynamically-consistent model, we avoid the issues of using simplified models for estimation. We develop an estimator for the center of mass and full momentum which can be reformulated to estimate center of mass offsets as well as external wrenches applied to the robot. The observability of these estimators is investigated and their performance is evaluated in comparison to previous approaches.

Alexander Herzog, Nicholas Rotella, Stefan Schaal et al.

Simplified models of the dynamics such as the linear inverted pendulum model (LIPM) have proven to perform well for biped walking on flat ground. However, for more complex tasks the assumptions of these models can become limiting. For example, the LIPM does not allow for the control of contact forces independently, is limited to co-planar contacts and assumes that the angular momentum is zero. In this paper, we propose to use the full momentum equations of a humanoid robot in a trajectory optimization framework to plan its center of mass, linear and angular momentum trajectories. The model also allows for planning desired contact forces for each end-effector in arbitrary contact locations. We extend our previous results on LQR design for momentum control by computing the (linearized) optimal momentum feedback law in a receding horizon fashion. The resulting desired momentum and the associated feedback law are then used in a hierarchical whole body control approach. Simulation experiments show that the approach is computationally fast and is able to generate plans for locomotion on complex terrains while demonstrating good tracking performance for the full humanoid control.

Alexander Herzog, Nicholas Rotella, Sean Mason et al.

Hierarchical inverse dynamics based on cascades of quadratic programs have been proposed for the control of legged robots. They have important benefits but to the best of our knowledge have never been implemented on a torque controlled humanoid where model inaccuracies, sensor noise and real-time computation requirements can be problematic. Using a reformulation of existing algorithms, we propose a simplification of the problem that allows to achieve real-time control. Momentum-based control is integrated in the task hierarchy and a LQR design approach is used to compute the desired associated closed-loop behavior and improve performance. Extensive experiments on various balancing and tracking tasks show very robust performance in the face of unknown disturbances, even when the humanoid is standing on one foot. Our results demonstrate that hierarchical inverse dynamics together with momentum control can be efficiently used for feedback control under real robot conditions.

Alexander Herzog, Ludovic Righetti, Felix Grimminger et al.

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.