Efficient Computation of Whole-Body Control Utilizing Simplified Whole-Body Dynamics via Centroidal Dynamics

Abstract: In this study, we present a novel method for enhancing the computational efficiency of whole-body control for humanoid robots, a challenge accentuated by their high degrees of freedom. The reduced-dimension rigid body dynamics of a floating base robot is constructed by segmenting its kinematic chain into constrained and unconstrained chains, simplifying the dynamics of the unconstrained chain through the centroidal dynamics. The proposed dynamics model is possible to be applied to whole-body control methods, allowing the problem to be divided into two parts for more efficient computation. The efficiency of the framework is demonstrated by comparative experiments in simulations. The calculation results demonstrate a significant reduction in processing time, highlighting an improvement over the times reported in current methodologies. Additionally, the results also shows the computational efficiency increases as the degrees of freedom of robot model increases.