A Unified Framework for Whole-Body Humanoid Robot Control with Multiple Constraints and Contacts

Physical interactivity is a major challenge in humanoid robotics. To allow robots to operate in human environments there is a pressing need for the development of control architectures that provide the advanced capabilities and interactive skills needed to effectively interact with the environment and/or the human partner while performing useful manipulation and locomotion tasks. Such architectures must address the robot whole-body control problem in its most general form: task and whole body motion coordination with active force control at contacts, under various constraints, self collision, and dynamic obstacles. In this paper we present a framework that addresses in a unified fashion the whole-body control problem in the context of multi-point multilink contacts, constraints, and obstacles. The effectiveness of this novel formulation is illustrated through extensive robot dynamic simulations conducted in SAI, and the experimental validation of the framework is currently underway on the ASIMO platform.