Towards deploying legged humanoids in human environments

While the area of whole-body controllers for humanoids have matured in recent years, deploying humanoid robots in human environments remains a challenge. One difficulty comes from the discrepancy between the models used to design the controllers and the unmodeled phenomena of the real world. Therefore, deploying robots require practical solutions that are robust to these discrepancies. To this end, this dissertation tackles a subset of real-world deployment problems and offers practical solutions to the domains explored. A common theme in the solutions presented have been to reformulate whole-body control concepts to make them realizable in the real-world. In particular, the use of kinematics for task-space trajectory generation in the high-level and joint position and velocity feedback control in the low-level play an important role in functional deployment. The former finds practical use, for instance, in gaze generation, thermal recovery operations, and whole-body manipulation, while the latter is important in dynamic balancing of biped robots and overall trajectory stabilization. This is not to claim that robot dynamics should be ignored for practical deployment. Instead however, the appropriate use of kinematics and dynamics information is the critical factor in efficient trajectory generation and robust feedback control of humanoids. To give evidence to this claim, the discussed approaches have been successfully deployed on a variety of humanoid platforms.