Dynamic Balancing of Humanoid Robot Walker3 with Proprioceptive Actuation: Systematic Design of Algorithm, Software and Hardware

TL;DR

This paper presents a systematic approach for real-time dynamic balancing of a humanoid robot with proprioceptive actuation, integrating optimized hierarchy, efficient control software, and friction modeling to enhance stability under disturbances.

Contribution

It introduces a customized task hierarchy, a real-time WBC implementation, and joint friction modeling for improved humanoid robot balancing performance.

Findings

Robust balance under external impulses

Effective handling of inclination and shift disturbances

High stability in unstructured environments

Abstract

Dynamic balancing under uncertain disturbances is important for a humanoid robot, which requires a good capability of coordinating the entire body redundancy to execute multi tasks. Whole-body control (WBC) based on hierarchical optimization has been generally accepted and utilized in torque-controlled robots. A good hierarchy is the prerequisite for WBC and can be predefined according to prior knowledge. However, the real-time computation would be problematic in the physical applications considering the computational complexity of WBC. For robots with proprioceptive actuation, the joint friction in gear reducer would also degrade the torque tracking performance. In our paper, a reasonable hierarchy of tasks and constraints is first customized for robot dynamic balancing. Then a real-time WBC is implemented via a computationally efficient WBC software. Such a method is solved on a modular master control system UBTMaster characterized by the real-time communication and powerful computing capability. After the joint friction being well covered by the model identification, extensive experiments on various balancing scenarios are conducted on a humanoid Walker3 with proprioceptive actuation. The robot shows an outstanding balance performance even under external impulses as well as the two feet of the robot suffering the inclination and shift disturbances independently. The results demonstrate that with the strict hierarchy, real-time computation and joint friction being handled carefully, the robot with proprioceptive actuation can manage the dynamic physical interactions with the unstructured environments well.