Multicontact Postures Computation on Manifolds

Abstract

Abstract-We propose a framework to generate static robot configurations satisfying a set of physical and geometrical constraints. This is done by formulating nonlinear constrained optimization problems over non-Euclidean manifolds and solving them. To do so, we present a new sequential quadratic programming (SQP) solver working natively on general manifolds, and propose an interface to easily formulate the problems, with the tedious and error-prone work automated for the user. We also introduce several new types of constraints for having more complex contacts or working on forces/torques. Our approach allows an elegant mathematical description of the constraints and we exemplify it through formulation and computation examples in complex scenarios with humanoid robots.

Humanoid Robots in Aircraft Manufacturing: The Airbus Use Cases

“…Our approach is to exploit knowledge from how humans operate in similar circumstances and considering that predefined procedures dictate grossly what contact sequence is necessary to conform both safety and task needs. Then, the posture that the robot takes in order to achieve a given task in a multicontact setting is computed, including task forces [2]. Indeed, the force required for a given task has great influence on the configuration to be taken.…”

“…We have investigated capacitive sensing because it is widely used and proved to be efficient in robotics, see e.g. FOGALE 2 , with which we paired to challenge (i) customizing the technology to whole-body humanoids, and (ii) increase the sampling frequency to include the signals in the control-loop. Fig.…”

A circuit-breaker use-case operated by a humanoid in aircraft manufacturing

“…The technological bottleneck concerns (i) navigation that we are addressing in the frame of the COMANOID 3 project [8] using multi-contact technology [6], [7], [5], [9] that is yet to be demonstrated with our humanoid in a 1:1 scale airplane mock-up, and (ii) once near the circuit-breaker panel, achieve the functional verification tasks and eventually report any encountered problem. For this purpose, AGI has provided a mock-up that is described in section V.…”

“…As this contact planning is related to the task to be performed, we named it task-aware contact 4 www.comanoid.eu planning. We have two main ingredients to achieve this goal in this purpose study: 1) our current planning [6] and control [22] considers all manipulated objects and the environment as "robots" that are represented as a kinematic trees; 2) we recently devised a posture generator (PG) software that can compute static postures under a set of constraints including prevision on the applied forces (with equalities, bounds, inequalities) [9]. We integrate the creation of such a contact, that is forcetask driven (instead of the locomotion-driven) to the general multi-contact planning context.…”

Multi-Contact Planning on Humans for Physical Assistance by Humanoid

“…(Fig. 1) We build additional constraints to the posture generator (PG) in [9] formulated as non-linear optimization on non-euclidean manifolds. Multi-contact planning follows care-givers guidance to build and initialize PG, which includes the robot, assistance task and human inherent constraints and objectives.…”