Title: Exploiting Friction in Torque Controlled Humanoid Robots,
Abstract: A common architecture for torque controlled humanoid robots consists in two
nested loops. The outer loop generates desired joint/motor torques, and the
inner loop stabilises these desired values. In doing so, the inner loop usually
compensates for joint friction phenomena, thus removing their inherent
stabilising property that may be also beneficial for high level control
objectives. This paper shows how to exploit friction for joint and task space
control of humanoid robots. Experiments are carried out using the humanoid
robot iCub.