8 research outputs found
Multi-contact Planning on Humans for Physical Assistance by Humanoid
International audienceFor robots to interact with humans in close proximity safely and efficiently, a specialized method to compute whole-body robot posture and plan contact locations is required. In our work, a humanoid robot is used as a caregiver that is performing a physical assistance task. We propose a method for formulating and initializing a non-linear optimization posture generation problem from an intuitive description of the assistance task and the result of a human point cloud processing. The proposed method allows to plan whole-body posture and contact locations on a task-specific surface of a human body, under robot equilibrium, friction cone, torque/joint limits, collision avoidance, and assistance task inherent constraints. The proposed framework can uniformly handle any arbitrary surface generated from point clouds, for autonomously planing the contact locations and interaction forces on potentially moving, movable, and deformable surfaces, which occur in direct physical human-robot interaction. We conclude the paper with examples of posture generation for physical human-robot interaction scenarios
STANCE: Locomotion Adaptation over Soft Terrain
Whole-body Control (WBC) has emerged as an important framework in locomotion
control for legged robots. However, most of WBC frameworks fail to generalize
beyond rigid terrains. Legged locomotion over soft terrain is difficult due to
the presence of unmodeled contact dynamics that WBCs do not account for. This
introduces uncertainty in locomotion and affects the stability and performance
of the system. In this paper, we propose a novel soft terrain adaptation
algorithm called STANCE: Soft Terrain Adaptation and Compliance Estimation.
STANCE consists of a WBC that exploits the knowledge of the terrain to generate
an optimal solution that is contact consistent and an online terrain compliance
estimator that provides the WBC with terrain knowledge. We validated STANCE
both in simulation and experiment on the Hydraulically actuated Quadruped (HyQ)
robot, and we compared it against the state of the art WBC. We demonstrated the
capabilities of STANCE with multiple terrains of different compliances,
aggressive maneuvers, different forward velocities, and external disturbances.
STANCE allowed HyQ to adapt online to terrains with different compliances
(rigid and soft) without pre-tuning. HyQ was able to successfully deal with the
transition between different terrains and showed the ability to differentiate
between compliances under each foot.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figure
Quadratic Programming for Multirobot and Task-Space Force Control
International audienceWe have extended the task-space multiobjective controllers that write as quadratic programs (QPs) to handle multirobot systems as a single centralized control. The idea is to assemble all the “robots” models and their interaction task constraints into a single QP formulation. By multirobot, we mean that whatever entities a given robot will interact with (solid or articulated systems, actuated, partially or not at all, fixed-base or floating-base), we model them as clusters of robots and the controller computes the state of each cluster as an overall system and their interaction forces in a physically consistent way. By doing this, the tasks specification simplifies substantially. At the heart of the interactions between the systems are the contact forces; methodologies are provided to achieve reliable force tracking by our multirobot QP controller. The approach is assessed by a large panel of experiments on real complex robotic platforms (full-size humanoid, dexterous robotic hand, fixed-base anthropomorphic arm) performing whole-body manipulations, dexterous manipulations, and robot-robot comanipulations of rigid floating objects and articulated mechanisms, such as doors, drawers, boxes, or even smaller mechanisms like a spring-loaded click pen