An Adaptive Approach to Whole-Body Balance Control of Wheel-Bipedal Robot Ollie

The wheel-bipedal robot has the advantages of both wheeled robots and legged robots, but as a cost, it is more challenging to perform flexible movements in various surroundings while keeping it balanced. The inaccurate dynamics of the robot makes the balance problem even more intractable. To solve this problem, the robot Ollie is used as a testbed. The whole-body control (WBC) framework is adopted to enhance the dexterity of the robot with multiple degrees of freedom in the task space. Moreover, a learning-based adaptive technique is applied to assist the WBC such that the balance controller can be designed in the absence of the accurate dynamics. Physical experiments demonstrate that the robot can manage various actions, with the help of the combination of the WBC and the learning-based adaptive technique.