The MIT Humanoid Robot: Design, Motion Planning, and Control For Acrobatic Behaviors
This work addresses the problem of achieving highly dynamic and agile movements in humanoid robots, which is crucial for advancing robotics in applications requiring complex physical interactions, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing motion planning and control methods.
The paper tackled the challenge of enabling acrobatic behaviors like flips and spinning jumps in a humanoid robot by developing a new robot design, an actuator-aware motion planner, and a landing controller, successfully demonstrating these dynamic motions in simulation.
Demonstrating acrobatic behavior of a humanoid robot such as flips and spinning jumps requires systematic approaches across hardware design, motion planning, and control. In this paper, we present a new humanoid robot design, an actuator-aware kino-dynamic motion planner, and a landing controller as part of a practical system design for highly dynamic motion control of the humanoid robot. To achieve the impulsive motions, we develop two new proprioceptive actuators and experimentally evaluate their performance using our custom-designed dynamometer. The actuator's torque, velocity, and power limits are reflected in our kino-dynamic motion planner by approximating the configuration-dependent reaction force limits and in our dynamics simulator by including actuator dynamics along with the robot's full-body dynamics. For the landing control, we effectively integrate model-predictive control and whole-body impulse control by connecting them in a dynamically consistent way to accomplish both the long-time horizon optimal control and high-bandwidth full-body dynamics-based feedback. Actuators' torque output over the entire motion are validated based on the velocity-torque model including battery voltage droop and back-EMF voltage. With the carefully designed hardware and control framework, we successfully demonstrate dynamic behaviors such as back flips, front flips, and spinning jumps in our realistic dynamics simulation.