A Whole-Body Software Abstraction layer for Control Design of free-floating Mechanical Systems
This work simplifies control design for robotics researchers and engineers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing control methods with a new software layer.
The authors tackled the complexity of designing whole-body controllers for free-floating mechanical systems by proposing a software abstraction layer that decouples control software from robotic platform details, resulting in cleaner and more concise code.
In this paper, we propose a software abstraction layer to simplify the design and synthesis of whole-body controllers without making any preliminary assumptions on the control law to be implemented. The main advantage of the proposed library is the decoupling of the control software from implementation details, which are related to the robotic platform. Furthermore, the resulting code is more clean and concise than ad-hoc code, as it focuses only on the implementation of the control law. In addition, we present a reference implementation of the abstraction layer together with a Simulink interface to provide support to Model-Driven based development. We also show the implementation of a simple proportional-derivative plus gravity compensation control together with a more complex momentum-based bipedal balance controller.