Exploring Kinodynamic Fabrics for Reactive Whole-Body Control of Underactuated Humanoid Robots

Abstract

For bipedal humanoid robots to successfully operate in the real world, they must be competent at simultaneously executing multiple motion tasks while reacting to unforeseen external disturbances in real-time. We propose Kinodynamic Fabrics as an approach for the specification, solution and simultaneous execution of multiple motion tasks in real-time while being reactive to dynamism in the environment. Kinodynamic Fabrics allows for the specification of prioritized motion tasks as forced spectral semi-sprays and solves for desired robot joint accelerations at real-time frequencies. We evaluate the capabilities of Kinodynamic fabrics on diverse physically-challenging whole-body control tasks with a bipedal humanoid robot both in simulation and in the real-world. Kinodynamic Fabrics outperforms the state-of-the-art Quadratic Program based whole-body controller on a variety of whole-body control tasks on run-time and reactivity metrics in our experiments. Our open-source implementation of Kinodynamic Fabrics as well as robot demonstration videos can be found at this url: https://adubredu.github.io/kinofabs