Step Toward Deploying the Torque-Controlled Robot TALOS on Industrial Operations

This paper tackles the use of torque controlled humanoid robot TALOS in the context of industrial manufacturing. It demonstrates that it is possible to use Whole Body Model Predictive Control (WBMPC) to reliably insert a tool in the holes of an aircraft structure with an accuracy of few millimeters. This result is based on the use of Crocoddyl, an optimal control library that exploits differential dynamic programming (DDP) to achieve high numerical efficiency. The focus of this article is put on the procedure that was undertaken to shape the cost function of the optimal controller. Our approach has first been validate in a low performance setting on the humanoid robot TALOS. Then, a strategy to improve the performances by reinjecting information about the posture of the robot from previous experiments is showed in simulation.