Experiments on the Meka Humanoid Robot demonstrating prioritized compliant control

This video shows various experiments of the control of UT Austin's humanoid Meka robot. We demonstrate prioritized torque control strategies, addressing hand position tasks and dynamically compensated posture optimization. At the theoretical level, we validate parts of the whole-body compliant control framework outlined in Dr. Sentis Thesis in Chapters 2, 3, and 4. In particular, the main contribution of the experiments is the ability to optimize posture performance by dynamically compensating the postural mass matrix with the task's null space matrix. At the software level, we demonstrate the operability of the real time whole-body control (WBC) software architecture developed by Dr. Roland Philippsen and Dr. Luis Sentis. The software is running under Ubuntu Linux 10.0.4 with and RTAI Kernel at servo rates of 1000 Hz. For more information on the lab's activities, please refer to the Human Centered Robotics Laboratory (http://www.me.utexas.edu/~hcrl). The experiments were conducted during the period October 21-23, 2010 in Austin, Texas.