Feasibility Retargeting for Multi-contact Teleoperation and Physical Interaction

TL;DR

This paper presents SEIKO, a real-time retargeting framework for multi-contact teleoperation that ensures feasible robot configurations and integrates physical interaction, demonstrated through simulations and hardware experiments.

Contribution

The paper introduces SEIKO, a novel real-time retargeting method that guarantees feasible configurations and combines physical interaction for multi-contact teleoperation.

Findings

SEIKO successfully applied in simulations on humanoid and quadruped robots.

Real hardware tests show effective bimanual heavy object carrying.

Framework ensures real-time, feasible control commands.

Abstract

This short paper outlines two recent works on multi-contact teleoperation and the development of the SEIKO (Sequential Equilibrium Inverse Kinematic Optimization) framework. SEIKO adapts commands from the operator in real-time and ensures that the reference configuration sent to the underlying controller is feasible. Additionally, an admittance scheme is used to implement physical interaction, which is then combined with the operator's command and retargeted. SEIKO has been applied in simulations on various robots, including humanoid and quadruped robots designed for loco-manipulation. Furthermore, SEIKO has been tested on real hardware for bimanual heavy object carrying tasks.