Humanoid 2015

Whole-Body Multi-Task Multi-Contact Humanoid Control

Recent developments in torque-controlled humanoids, efficient dynamics algorithms, whole body control, and human modeling, have set the stage for robots to achieve human-like whole-body control and manipulation. Achieving this will require progress in understanding human manipulation strategies while making multiple contacts with a dynamic environment, and mapping those to humanoid robots using efficient algorithms. Any associated control framework must guarantee stability, controllability, local progress towards the goal, and the ability to integrate with trajectory generation and planning routines.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers working on whole-body control, dynamics, and human modeling to exchange ideas and discuss possible directions to enhance humanoid whole-body control. A particular focus of the workshop is to highlight whole-body frameworks that enable multi-contact manipulation tasks in unstructured environments.

The first half of this workshop is devoted to presenting and disseminating the essentials of the operational space control - a framework that has been developed at Stanford Robotics Lab in the past three decades - which provides a unifying formalism to perform whole-body multi-task multi-contact robot control. We aim at presenting the operational space control in a set of connected tutorial-form talks. We start with general description and formalism of the method and then dive into details on its theoretical and algorithmic development with special focus on its application on whole-body humanoid control. We cover concepts such as multi-contact control, multi-robot collaboration, dynamic description of (multi) robots at a desired point, task hierarchies, and human motion analysis.

The second half of the workshop includes several invited talks from experts in the field of whole-body humanoid control to present their latest theoretical achievements in this rapidly growing field. The talks will be followed by an hour of round table between the audience and the panel members (composed of both invited speakers and the organizers).