Momentum Control of an Underactuated Flying Humanoid Robot
This is an incremental step towards enabling flying humanoid robots to perform flight, locomotion, and manipulation tasks.
The paper tackles the problem of controlling an underactuated flying humanoid robot by stabilizing its centroidal momentum to track desired center-of-mass trajectories and orientation, with simulations on the iCub model verifying the approach.
The paper takes the first step towards the de- velopment of a control framework for underactuated flying humanoid robots. These robots may thus have the capacities of flight, contact locomotion, and manipulation, and benefit from technologies and methods developed for Whole-Body Control and Aerial Manipulation. As in the case of quadrotors, we as- sume that the humanoid robot is powered by four thrust forces. For convenience, these forces are placed at the robot hands and feet. The control objective is defined as the asymptotic stabilization of the robot centroidal momentum. This objective allows us to track a desired trajectory for the robot center of mass and keep small errors between a reference orientation and the robot base frame. Stability and convergence of the robot momentum are shown to be in the sense of Lyapunov. Simulations carried out on a model of the humanoid robot iCub verify the soundness of the proposed approach.