Fast Whole-Body Motion Control of Humanoid Robots with Inertia Constraints
This enables efficient motion control for humanoid robots, particularly in resource-constrained applications, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing inertia modeling approaches.
The authors tackled the problem of generating whole-body motions for humanoid robots by introducing an analytical method that approximates desired Composite Rigid Body inertia using a reduced five mass model, achieving computation times in the order of tens of microseconds.
We introduce a new, analytical method for generating whole-body motions for humanoid robots, which approximate the desired Composite Rigid Body (CRB) inertia. Our approach uses a reduced five mass model, where four of the masses are attributed to the limbs and one is used for the trunk. This compact formulation allows for finding an analytical solution that combines the kinematics with mass distribution and inertial properties of a humanoid robot. The positioning of the masses in Cartesian space is then directly used to obtain joint angles with relations based on simple geometry. Motions are achieved through the time evolution of poses generated through the desired foot positioning and CRB inertia properties. As a result, we achieve short computation times in the order of tens of microseconds. This makes the method suited for applications with limited computation resources, or leaving them to be spent on higher-layer tasks such as model predictive control. The approach is evaluated by performing a dynamic kicking motion with an igus Humanoid Open Platform robot.