Valkyrie: NASA's First Bipedal Humanoid Robot

By N. Radford, Philip Strawser, K. Hambuchen, J. Mehling, W. Verdeyen, A. Donnan, James Holley, Jairo Sanchez, Vienny Nguyen, L. Bridgwater and 37 more. J. Field Robotics, 2015

307 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In December 2013, 16 teams from around the world gathered at Homestead Speedway near Miami, FL to participate in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Trials, an aggressive robotics competition partly inspired by the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi reactor incident. While the focus of the DRC Trials is to advance robotics for use in austere and inhospitable environments, the objectives of the DRC are to progress the areas of supervised autonomy and mobile manipulation for everyday robotics. NASA's Johnson Space Center led a team comprised of numerous partners to develop Valkyrie, NASA's first bipedal humanoid robot. Valkyrie is a 44 degree‐of‐freedom, series elastic actuator‐based robot that draws upon over 18 years of humanoid robotics design heritage. Valkyrie's application intent is aimed at not only responding to events like Fukushima, but also advancing human spaceflight endeavors in extraterrestrial planetary settings. This paper presents a brief system overview, detailing Valkyrie's mechatronic subsystems, followed by a summarization of the inverse kinematics‐based walking algorithm employed at the Trials. Next, the software and control architectures are highlighted along with a description of the operator interface tools. Finally, some closing remarks are given about the competition, and a vision of future work is provided.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Control and Systems Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f710201366d7c59c5b8e3916856b0351031c33ea

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Citations in the corpus

MIT Cheetah 3: Design and Control of a Robust, Dynamic Quadruped Robot (2018, background): “, [4], [5]) in research labs have begun to lend credibility to vision of legged robots making their way into our human environments to operate by our side or in our stead.”
HumanPlus: Humanoid Shadowing and Imitation from Humans (2024, background): “While model-based control [16, 36, 40, 55, 69, 92, 98] has made tremendous progress on a wide variety of humanoid robots [13, 32, 37, 54, 65, 89], learning-based meth-ods can achieve robust locomotion performance for humanoids [39, 67, 68, 85, 91, 94, 103] and biped robots [4, 42, 44, 45, 83, 84,…”
ANYmal - toward legged robots for harsh environments (2017, background): “Several state of the art robots like the humanoidValkyrie [18] or the quadruped StarlETH [11] showed how to use such actuators not only for precise output force regulation, but even to temporarily store energy during locomotion and hence to increase locomotion efficiency [19].”
ANYmal - a highly mobile and dynamic quadrupedal robot (2016, unknown): “Similar to the work by Paine [20], which is also the basis of the control of Valkyrie [15], we realized a simple PID torque feedback loop with feedback friction compensation.”