What is Whole Body Control ?

Here,whole body control means a control framework proposed by Prof. Oussama Khatib. The framework is also known as task space control, operational space control, or operational space formulation.

When you control a robot with many joints, it's hard to compute a desired angle/torque set of joints. Traditional approach is inverse kinematics(IK), which is a geometric solution. IK-based control is still good, but here is a different approach, whole body control. ahl_wbc computes a desired angle/torque set, given a desired position/orientation of a robot's fingertip.

Therefore, if you used this framework, you could easily control complex robots without using IK. Also, if the robot had torque sensor at each joint, all of force, position and orientation of fingertip would be controlled in hybrid way.

  author    = {Oussama Khatib},
  title     = {A Unified Approach for Motion and Force Control of Robot Manipulators:   The Operational Space Formulation},
  year      = {1987},
  month     = {February},
  booktitle = {IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automation (RA-3)},
}

For more details, see github page.