The MIT Humanoid Robot: Design, Motion Planning, and Control For Acrobatic Behaviors

Demonstrating acrobatic behavior of a humanoid robot such as flips and spinning jumps requires systematic approaches across hardware design, motion planning, and control. In this paper, we present a new humanoid robot design, an actuator-aware kino-dynamic motion planner, and a landing controller as part of a practical system design for highly dynamic motion control of the humanoid robot. To achieve the impulsive motions, we develop two new proprioceptive actuators. The actuator’s torque, velocity, and power limits are reflected in our kino-dynamic motion planner by approximating the configuration-dependent reaction force limits. For the landing control, we effectively integrate model-predictive control and whole-body impulse control by connecting them in a dynamically consistent way to accomplish both the long-time horizon optimal control and high-bandwidth full-body dynamics-based feedback. With the carefully designed hardware and control framework, we successfully demonstrate dynamic behaviors such as back flips, front flips, and spinning jumps in our realistic dynamics simulation.