Thermal Recovery of Multi-Limbed Robots with Electric Actuators

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.