Momentum-Centered control of contact interactions

Abstract

The control and planning of interaction forces is fundamental for locomotion and manipulation tasks since it is through the interaction with the environment that a robot can walk forward or manipulate objects. In this chapter we present a control and planning strategy focused on the control of interaction forces to generate multi-contact whole-body behaviors. Centered around the robot momentum dynamics, our approach consists of a hierarchical inverse dynamics controller that treats the control of the robot’s momentum as a contact force task and a trajectory optimization algorithm that can generate desired whole-body motions, momentum and desired contact forces for multiple contacts. Experimental results demonstrate the capabilities of the approach on a humanoid robot.