Learning to Control in Operational Space

One of the most general frameworks for phrasing control problems for complex, redundant robots is operational space control. However, while this framework is of essential importance for robotics and well-understood from an analytical point of view, it can be prohibitively hard to achieve accurate control in face of modeling errors, which are inevitable in complex robots, e.g., humanoid robots. In this paper, we suggest a learning approach for opertional space control as a direct inverse model learning problem. A first important insight for this paper is that a physically correct solution to the inverse problem with redundant degrees-of-freedom does exist when learning of the inverse map is performed in a suitable piecewise linear way. The second crucial component for our work is based on the insight that many operational space controllers can be understood in terms of a constrained optimal control problem. The cost function associated with this optimal control problem allows us to for...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: IJRR
• Authors: Jan Peters, Stefan Schaal
• Keywords: Control Problem, IJRR 2008, Operational Space, Optimal Control Problem