Guest Editorial of the Special Issue on Whole-Body Control for Robots in the Real World

Research in whole-body control (WBC) aims to contribute to provide robots with those capabilities that are necessary to move and perform in real world scenarios. Until recent years, limitations on hardware relegated WBC to almost purely theoretical research. Recently, a growing number of experimental platforms have become available (in particular, torque-controlled humanoids). This new opportunity has triggered the deployment on real robots of the theoretical outcomes of research in the field. This is backed up by a number of new research projects and initiatives addressing issues in this domain, including the Darpa robotic challenge (DRC). The goal of this special issue is to provide a clear representation of what is the state-of-the-art in WBC, and to help identifying what steps still need to be taken to have humanoid robots moving out of research laboratories to real world applications.