The ARC-OPT Library for Whole-Body Control of Robotic Systems

Abstract

ARC-OPT (Adaptive Robot Control using OPTimization) is a C++ library for Whole-Body Control (WBC) (Sentis & Khatib, 2006) of complex robotic systems, such as humanoids, quadrupedal robots, or mobile manipulators.In general, WBC describes a robot control problem in terms of costs and constraints of a quadratic program (QP).The cost function thereby minimizes the residuals of multiple feedback controllers, each dedicated to a specific robot task, along with further objectives.In each control cycle, the QP is solved and the solution, which should fulfill all objectives if possible, is sent to the robot's actuators.WBC is a reactive control approach, which targets redundant robots and is able to control multiple tasks simultaneously, like, e.g., grasping and balancing on a humanoid robot.