Local-level control of a humanoid robot prototype with force-driven balance

The recent trend of humanoid robotics research has been deeply influenced by concepts such as distributed architectures, local control, force interaction and emergence of coordinated motions. A hypothesis is that feedback control from several sensors, such as force sensors and inertial devices, and more advanced control algorithms will be a key issue for the next developments. In this paper, we discuss how these concepts have been applied to a custom low-cost humanoid platform developed for research purposes. The humanoid robot is equipped with a rich set of sensors enabling the evaluation of simple feedback rules used online to control the robot. A great focus has been given to a force-driven controller based on the Jacobian transpose. A kind of intermediate local-level controller is implemented based on force sensing, providing robust and adaptive behaviour. The proposed ideas and concepts are introduced and validated in several hardware experiments.