This article presents the SEIKO pipeline, a new method to enhance the balance and performance of position-controlled robots like humanoids or multi-legged robots. The approach draws inspiration from flexibility models used in serial elastic actuators to indirectly control contact forces. The pipeline formulates whole-body retargeting from Cartesian commands and admittance control using two quadratic programs. The authors validated their pipeline with experiments on the humanoid robot Talos in various multi-contact scenarios. This work aims to enable stable, contact-rich behaviors while overcoming challenges of torque-controlled robots.
Publication date: 29 Dec 2023
Project Page: https://hucebot.github.io/seiko_controller_website/
Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.16465
