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Humanoid robots may require a degree of compliance at the joint level for improving efficiency, shock tolerance, and safe interaction with humans. The presence of joint elasticity, however, complexifies the design of balancing and walking…
Envisioned applications for humanoid robots call for the design of balancing and walking controllers. While promising results have been recently achieved, robust and reliable controllers are still a challenge for the control community…
Soft and soft-rigid hybrid robots are inherently underactuated and operate under tight actuator limits, making task-space control with stability guarantees challenging. Common nonlinear strategies for soft robots (e.g., those based on PD…
This paper presents a modeling and control framework for multibody flying robots subject to non-negligible aerodynamic forces acting on the centroidal dynamics. First, aerodynamic forces are calculated during robot flight in different…
Robots with multi-modal locomotion are an active research field due to their versatility in diverse environments. In this context, additional actuation can provide humanoid robots with aerial capabilities. Flying humanoid robots face…
We propose a novel Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework for a jet-powered flying humanoid robot. The controller is based on a linearised centroidal momentum model to represent the flight dynamics, augmented with a second-order nonlinear…
Humanoids are versatile robotic platforms owing to their limbs with multiple degrees of freedom. Although humanoids can walk like humans, they are relatively slow, and cannot run over large barriers. To address these limitations, we aim to…
Jumping can be an effective way of locomotion to overcome small terrain gaps or obstacles. In this paper we propose two different approaches to perform jumps with a humanoid robot. Specifically, starting from a pre-defined CoM trajectory we…
Humanoid robots are machines built with an anthropomorphic shape. Despite decades of research into the subject, it is still challenging to tackle the robot locomotion problem from an algorithmic point of view. For example, these machines…
Enforcing balance of multi-limbed robots in multiple non-coplanar unilateral contact settings is challenging when a subset of such contacts are also induced in motion tasks. The first contribution of this paper is in enhancing the…
With the goal of moving towards implementation of increasingly dynamic behaviors on underactuated systems, this paper presents an optimization-based approach for solving full-body dynamics based controllers on underactuated bipedal robots.…
Legged robots are typically in rigid contact with the environment at multiple locations, which add a degree of complexity to their control. We present a method to control the motion and a subset of the contact forces of a floating-base…
This paper proposes a technique for automatic gain tuning of a momentum based balancing controller for humanoid robots. The controller ensures the stabilization of the centroidal dynamics and the associated zero dynamics. Then, the…
Balancing and reacting to strong and unexpected pushes is a critical requirement for humanoid robots. We recently designed a capture point based approach which interfaces with a momentum-based torque controller and we implemented and…
Achieving short-distance flight helps improve the efficiency of humanoid robots moving in complex environments (e.g., crossing large obstacles or reaching high places) for rapid emergency missions. This study proposes a design of a flying…
For safe and effective operation of humanoid robots in human-populated environments, the problem of commanding a large number of Degrees of Freedom (DoF) while simultaneously considering dynamic obstacles and human proximity has still not…
We present an integrated approach to locomotion and balancing of humanoid robots based on direct centroidal control. Our method uses a five-mass description of a humanoid. It generates whole-body motions from desired foot trajectories and…
Hierarchical inverse dynamics based on cascades of quadratic programs have been proposed for the control of legged robots. They have important benefits but to the best of our knowledge have never been implemented on a torque controlled…
Recently several hierarchical inverse dynamics controllers based on cascades of quadratic programs have been proposed for application on torque controlled robots. They have important theoretical benefits but have never been implemented on a…
Impact-aware tasks (i.e. on purpose impacts) are not handled in multi-objective whole body controllers of hu-manoid robots. This leads to the fact that a humanoid robot typically operates at near-zero velocity to interact with the external…