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Whole-body impedance control of wheeled mobile manipulators

Stability analysis and experiments on the humanoid robot Rollin’ Justin

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Abstract

Humanoid service robots in domestic environments have to interact with humans and their surroundings in a safe and reliable way. One way to manage that is to equip the robotic systems with force-torque sensors to realize a physically compliant whole-body behavior via impedance control. To provide mobility, such robots often have wheeled platforms. The main advantage is that no balancing effort has to be made compared to legged humanoids. However, the nonholonomy of most wheeled systems prohibits the direct implementation of impedance control due to kinematic rolling constraints that must be taken into account in modeling and control. In this paper we design a whole-body impedance controller for such a robot, which employs an admittance interface to the kinematically controlled mobile platform. The upper body impedance control law, the platform admittance interface, and the compensation of dynamic couplings between both subsystems yield a passive closed loop. The convergence of the state to an invariant set is shown. To prove asymptotic stability in the case of redundancy, priority-based approaches can be employed. In principle, the presented approach is the extension of the well-known and established impedance controller to mobile robots. Experimental validations are performed on the humanoid robot Rollin’ Justin. The method is suitable for compliant manipulation tasks with low-dimensional planning in the task space.

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Notes

  1. Since most manipulators are rather equipped with revolute joints than prismatic joints, we refer to joint torques in this paper. Nevertheless, the generalization to joint forces and joint torques can be made without loss of generality.

  2. Equation (24) does not match the real physical energy due to the use of the admittance inertia instead of the real one. An overall potential energy including the other subtasks is not meaningful due to the null space projections (Dietrich et al. (2013)).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Muenchner Strasse 20, 82234, Wessling, Germany

    Alexander Dietrich, Kristin Bussmann, Florian Petit, Christian Ott & Alin Albu-Schäffer

  2. Institute of Automatic Control, Technische Universität München (TUM), Boltzmannstrasse 15, 85748, Garching, Germany

    Paul Kotyczka & Boris Lohmann

  3. Sensor-Based Robotic Systems and Intelligent Assistance Systems, Technische Universität München (TUM), Boltzmannstrasse 3, 85748, Garching, Germany

    Alin Albu-Schäffer

Authors
  1. Alexander Dietrich
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  2. Kristin Bussmann
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  3. Florian Petit
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  4. Paul Kotyczka
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  5. Christian Ott
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  6. Boris Lohmann
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  7. Alin Albu-Schäffer
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alexander Dietrich.

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Dietrich, A., Bussmann, K., Petit, F. et al. Whole-body impedance control of wheeled mobile manipulators. Auton Robot 40, 505–517 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-015-9438-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-015-9438-z

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