Efficient Computation of Whole-Body Control Utilizing Simplified Whole-Body Dynamics via Centroidal Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method for more efficient whole-body control of humanoid robots by simplifying dynamics through centroidal dynamics, significantly reducing computation time especially for robots with many degrees of freedom.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel dynamics simplification approach that divides the control problem, improving computational efficiency for humanoid robot control.

Findings

Significant reduction in processing time demonstrated in simulations.

Efficiency increases with higher degrees of freedom.

Method outperforms current approaches in computational speed.

Abstract

In this study, we present a novel method for enhancing the computational efficiency of whole-body control for humanoid robots, a challenge accentuated by their high degrees of freedom. The reduced-dimension rigid body dynamics of a floating base robot is constructed by segmenting its kinematic chain into constrained and unconstrained chains, simplifying the dynamics of the unconstrained chain through the centroidal dynamics. The proposed dynamics model is possible to be applied to whole-body control methods, allowing the problem to be divided into two parts for more efficient computation. The efficiency of the framework is demonstrated by comparative experiments in simulations. The calculation results demonstrate a significant reduction in processing time, highlighting an improvement over the times reported in current methodologies. Additionally, the results also shows the computational efficiency increases as the degrees of freedom of robot model increases.