Context-Adaptive Selection and Control of Whole Body Behaviours

Whole body control (WBC) is a robot control method that targets robotic systems with many degrees of freedom and tasks with multiple, concurrent objectives in dynamically changing environments. In WBC, robot tasks are described by combinations of simple, generic task descriptors, which are usually stated as constraints to an optimization problem.
In spite of the generic nature of constraints as building blocks, task descriptions in WBC, i.e. combinations of constraints and their parametrizations, are usually manually selected and tailored to a specific situation. Automatizing the process of selecting and parametrizing whole body behaviours according to the given task context would greatly increase the autonomy of robots in varying situations.
In this talk I will give an introduction to WBC and the present state of our research in this field. I will summarize the shortcomings that are common to the most widely used WBC approaches and how they are being tackled by other people. Furthermore, I will give an overview of initial ideas regarding future research.