Whole body motion controller with long-term balance constraints

The standard approach to real-time control of humanoid robots relies on approximate models to produce a motion plan, which is then used to control the whole body. Separation of the planning stage from the controller makes it difficult to account for the whole body motion objectives and constraints in the plan. For this reason, we propose to omit the planning stage and introduce long-term balance constraints in the whole body controller to compensate for this omission. The new controller allows for generation of whole body walking motions, which are automatically decided based on both the whole body motion objectives and balance preservation constraints. The validity of the proposed approach is demonstrated in simulation in a case where the walking motion is driven by a desired wrist position. This approach is general enough to allow handling seamlessly various whole body motion objectives, such as desired head motions, obstacle avoidance for all parts of the robot, etc.