A full-body motion control method for a humanoid robot based on on-line estimation of the operational force of an object with an unknown weight

In this paper we propose a new method to manipulate heavy objects for a humanoid robot. In this method the manipulation strategy is determined based on on-line estimation of the operational force. We integrate these functions with a real-time controller that controls the external force and maintains full-body balance. The feature point of our work is that since a full-body control system includes switching of the manipulation strategy based on the operational force estimated on-line the system enables a humanoid robot to manipulate heavy objects as well as light objects. The effectiveness of our whole system is confirmed in our experiments, in which a humanoid robot manipulates up to 12[kg] while estimating the object´s weight.