English

Exploring Kinodynamic Fabrics for Reactive Whole-Body Control of Underactuated Humanoid Robots

Robotics 2023-08-25 v4

Abstract

For bipedal humanoid robots to successfully operate in the real world, they must be competent at simultaneously executing multiple motion tasks while reacting to unforeseen external disturbances in real-time. We propose Kinodynamic Fabrics as an approach for the specification, solution and simultaneous execution of multiple motion tasks in real-time while being reactive to dynamism in the environment. Kinodynamic Fabrics allows for the specification of prioritized motion tasks as forced spectral semi-sprays and solves for desired robot joint accelerations at real-time frequencies. We evaluate the capabilities of Kinodynamic fabrics on diverse physically challenging whole-body control tasks with a bipedal humanoid robot both in simulation and in the real-world. Kinodynamic Fabrics outperforms the state-of-the-art Quadratic Program based whole-body controller on a variety of whole-body control tasks on run-time and reactivity metrics in our experiments. Our open-source implementation of Kinodynamic Fabrics as well as robot demonstration videos can be found at this url: https://adubredu.github.io/kinofabs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2303.04279,
  title  = {Exploring Kinodynamic Fabrics for Reactive Whole-Body Control of Underactuated Humanoid Robots},
  author = {Alphonsus Adu-Bredu and Grant Gibson and Jessy W. Grizzle},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.04279},
  year   = {2023}
}