Momentum-based Balance Control for Torque-controlled Humanoids

In this contribution we propose a reformulation of a momentum-based balance controller originally proposed by Lee and Goswami. The advantage of our formulation is that we can guarantee that the control will satisfy any constraint in contact forces, joint accelerations and torque commands. Moreover, the formulation leads to an interesting insight into how equations of motion can be decoupled to significantly simplify the design of controllers based on the full robot dynamics. Finally, we present balancing experiments on a torque controlled humanoid robot. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that this momentum-based balance controller is implemented on a real robot, using a pure torque control approach.