Valkyrie, humanoid robot, NASA Johnson Space Cente, Houston, Texas, USA

https://youtu.be/OKyVkTAUqiM

Interactive whole-body IK on the NASA Valkyrie robot

Published on Aug 19, 2017

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This video summarizes the deployment of applications on Valkyrie performed by Steven Jens Jorgensen from the U. of Texas at Austin and other researchers at NASA, IHMC, and U. Michigan. Given desired end-effector poses, a nonlinear optimization routine is used to solve the whole-body Inverse Kinematics (IK) of NASA's Valkyrie robot while satisfying balance constraints. The joint position solutions are converted to the appropriate messages and are sent to IHMC's controller interface, which interpolates between the robot's initial (current) configuration to the desired configuration using third-order functions (polynomial for positions and a hermite curve for orientations). By specifying just the hand pose, a preliminary grasp planner uses the Whole-body IK solver to command Valkyrie's hand to the desired pose. The Whole-body work is a collaboration between NASA and the Human-Centered Robotics Lab (HCRL) at the University of Texas at Austin. The grasp planner is from The Laboratory for Progress at the University of Michigan. This work was partially supported by a NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship (NSTRF) under the grant number NNX15AQ42H.

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https://youtu.be/BQ_W-hJxt8o

Thermal recovery of multi-limbed robots with electric actuators

Published on Feb 27, 2019

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Preprint of the paper is available here.
Abstract: The problem of finding thermally minimizing configurations of a humanoid robot to recover its actuators from unsafe thermal states is addressed. A first-order, data-driven, effort-based, thermal model of the robot's actuators is devised, which is used to predict future thermal states. Given this predictive capability, a map between configurations and future temperatures is formulated to find what configurations, subject to valid contact constraints, can be taken now to minimize future thermal states. Effectively, this approach is a realization of a contact-constrained thermal inverse-kinematics (IK) process. Experimental validation of the proposed approach is performed on the NASA Valkyrie robot hardware.

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And another one! wow thanks Airicist

https://youtu.be/tcg6GcFuhuY

Deploying the NASA Valkyrie Humanoid for IED Response: An Initial Approach and Evaluation Summary

Sep 30, 2019

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To be presented at the IEEE Humanoids 2019 Conference)
Abstract: As part of a feasibility study, this paper shows the NASA Valkyrie humanoid robot performing an end-to-end improvised explosive device (IED) response task. To demonstrate and evaluate robot capabilities, sub-tasks highlight different locomotion, manipulation, and perception requirements: traversing uneven terrain, passing through a narrow passageway, opening a car door, retrieving a suspected IED, and securing the IED in a total containment vessel (TCV). For each sub-task, a description of the technical approach and the hidden challenges that were overcome during development are presented. The discussion of results, which explicitly includes existing limitations, is aimed at motivating continued research and development to enable practical deployment of humanoid robots for IED response. For instance, the data shows that operator pauses contribute to 50% of the total completion time, which implies that further work is needed on user interfaces for increasing task completion efficiency.*

The authors are with the NASA Johnson Space Center, TRACLabs,
the Institute for Human Machine and Cognition (IHMC), Jacobs Technology, METECS, CACI, and The University of Texas at Austin.

The first author is partially supported by a NASA Space Technology
Research Fellowship (NSTRF) Grant # NNX15AQ42H

This work was supported by the Combating Terrorism Technical
Support Office (CTTSO).

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Article "NASA’s humanoid robot heads to Australia for testing"
The Valkyrie robot could be used during Artemis and other space missions.

by Loukia Papadopoulos
July 8, 2023