Dancing Humanoid Robots: Systematic Use of OSID to Compute Dynamically Consistent Movements Following a Motion Capture Pattern

In October 2012, the humanoid robot HRP-2 was presented during a live demonstration performing fine-balanced dance movements with a human performer in front of more than 1,000 people. This success was made possible by the systematic use of operational-space inverse dynamics (OSID) to compute dynamically consistent movements following a motion capture pattern demonstrated by a human choreographer. The first goal of this article is to give an overview of the efficient inverse-dynamics method used to generate the dance motion. In addition to the methodological description, the main goal of this article is to present the robot dance as the first successful real-size implementation of inverse dynamics for humanoid-robot movement generation. This gives a proof-of-concept of the interest of inverse dynamics, which is more expressive than inverse kinematics (IK) but more computationally tractable than model predictive control (MPC). It is, in our opinion, the topical method of choice for humanoid whole-body movement generation. The real-size demonstration also gave us some insight of current methodological limits and the developments needed in the future.