Compliant Whole-body Control for Real-World Interactions - ICRA Keynote

As more complicated robots such as humanoid robots are expected to operate in complex environments, whole-body control has greatly progressed for robots operating in multiple contact scenarios. Now, various approaches can be used to create the compliant whole-body motion of robots, depending on hardware and control methods. In this talk, I would like to share my experience of implementing compliant whole-body motion control. The first one is on a torque-controlled robot using a whole-body controller based on the operational space control framework, and the second one is on a position-controlled robot by creating compliant motion using disturbance estimation. Implementation issues will be also discussed in these approaches. Finally, other exciting work in our research group will be briefly presented.

Jaeheung Park is a Professor in the Department of Transdisciplinary Studies at Seoul National University, South Korea, since 2009. Prior to joining Seoul National University, he shortly worked at Hansen Medical Inc, a medical robotics company. He received the Ph.D. degree from Stanford University, and the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Seoul National University. His research group is currently conducting many national projects on the topics of humanoid robots, rehabilitation/medical robots, and autonomous vehicles. He was a team leader of TEAM SNU for DRC Finals 2015 (DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals), which was a robotics competition for disaster response. In 2016, His team won the award given by Minister of Science, ICT, and Future Planning, at Challenge Parade that was held by the Korean Government. He has participated in organizing many international robotics conferences such as IROS, HUMANOIDS, and HRI. He has also served as a Conference Editorial Board or as an Associate Editor for many international conferences. He currently serves as a co-chair of the RAS Technical Committee on Whole-body Control.