Planning and control of a humanoid robot for navigation on uneven multi-scale terrain

Abstract

This paper presents a humanoid navigation system on uneven terrains that include unknown roughness on the order of a few centimeters. A footstep planner decides where to step by using the known terrain shape. A walking balance controller that consists of a 20[ms] cycle dynamically stable motion pattern generation loop and a 1[ms] cycle sensor feedback loop allows the robot to step to the planned footprints and is able to manage a few centimeters of uncertainty. The free leg trajectories and the torso height trajectory are also designed automatically according to the given terrain shape and the planned footprints. We introduced an interactive navigation system that uses mixed reality technology. An outline of the path can be drawn on the real environment to give the commands to the robot in the system. Each developed technology is implemented and integrated on the fullsize humanoid HRP-2. Experimental results walking over multi-level platform with unknown small obstacles show the performance of the proposed system.