In Proc. 11th Int’l Symp. of Robotics Research (ISRR 2003) Motion Planning for Humanoid Ro.pdf

In Proc. 11th Int’l Symp. of Robotics Research (ISRR 2003) Motion Planning for Humanoid Robots 1,2 3 2 3 James Kuffner , Koichi Nishiwaki , Satoshi Kagami , Masayuki Inaba , and Hirochika Inoue3 1 The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University kuffner@ /james 2 Digital Human Research Center National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) {s.kagami,j.kuffner}@aist.go.jp http://www.dh.aist.go.jp/ 3 School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo {nishi,inaba,inoue}@jsk.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp http://www.jsk.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ Abstract. Humanoid robotics hardware and control techniques have advanced rapidly during the last five years. Presently, several companies have announced the commercial availability of various humanoid robot prototypes. In order to improve the autonomy and overall func- tionality of these robots, reliable sensors, safety mechanisms, and general integrated software tools and techniques are needed. We believe that the development of practical motion plan- ning algorithms and obstacle avoidance software for humanoid robots represents an important enabling technology. This paper gives an overview of some of our recent efforts to develop motion planning methods for humanoid robots for application tasks involving navigation, object grasping and manipulation, footstep placement, and dynamically-stable full-body mo- tions. We show experimental results obtained by implementations running within a simulation environment as well as on actual humanoid robot hardware. 1 Introduction Humanoid robotics technology has recently made rapid progress, and the commercial availability of humanoid robot hardware will happen very soon. This will lead to a rising demand for software and algorithms useful to improving the usability and autonomy of