AUTHOR=Kang Sunhwi , Ishihara Koji , Sugimoto Norikazu , Morimoto Jun TITLE=Curriculum-based humanoid robot identification using large-scale human motion database JOURNAL=Frontiers in Robotics and AI VOLUME=10 YEAR=2023 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/robotics-and-ai/articles/10.3389/frobt.2023.1282299 DOI=10.3389/frobt.2023.1282299 ISSN=2296-9144 ABSTRACT=

Identifying an accurate dynamics model remains challenging for humanoid robots. The difficulty is mainly due to the following two points. First, a good initial model is required to evaluate the feasibility of motions for data acquisition. Second, a highly nonlinear optimization problem needs to be solved to design movements to acquire the identification data. To cope with the first point, in this paper, we propose a curriculum of identification to gradually learn an accurate dynamics model from an unreliable initial model. For the second point, we propose using a large-scale human motion database to efficiently design the humanoid movements for the parameter identification. The contribution of our study is developing a humanoid identification method that does not require the good initial model and does not need to solve the highly nonlinear optimization problem. We showed that our curriculum-based approach was able to more efficiently identify humanoid model parameters than a method that just randomly picked reference motions for identification. We evaluated our proposed method in a simulation experiment and demonstrated that our curriculum was led to obtain a wide variety of motion data for efficient parameter estimation. Consequently, our approach successfully identified an accurate model of an 18-DoF, simulated upper-body humanoid robot.