The NING Humanoid: The Concurrent Design and Development of a Dynamic and Agile Platform

TL;DR

This paper presents the NING Humanoid, a highly agile robot platform combining advanced hardware and control algorithms to perform dynamic tasks like jumping, flipping, and stair climbing, demonstrating high performance in real-time experiments.

Contribution

The paper introduces the NING Humanoid with integrated hardware co-design and a whole-body model predictive control framework for agile, dynamic humanoid robot capabilities.

Findings

Successfully demonstrated walking, push recovery, and stair climbing.

Achieved high control bandwidth for dynamic tasks.

Integrated hardware and control design for agility.

Abstract

The recent surge of interest in agile humanoid robots achieving dynamic tasks like jumping and flipping necessitates the concurrent design of a robot platform that combines exceptional hardware performance with effective control algorithms. This paper introduces the NING Humanoid, an agile and robust platform aimed at achieving human-like athletic capabilities. The NING humanoid features high-torque actuators, a resilient mechanical co-design based on the Centroidal dynamics, and a whole-body model predictive control (WB-MPC) framework. It stands at 1.1 meters tall and weighs 20 kg with 18 degrees of freedom (DOFs). It demonstrates impressive abilities such as walking, push recovery, and stair climbing at a high control bandwidth. Our presentation will encompass a hardware co-design, the control framework, as well as simulation and real-time experiments.