Intuitive and flexible user interface for creating whole body motions of biped humanoid robots

This paper proposes a novel user interface for creating whole body motions of biped humanoid robots just by giving key poses. Although such an interface is popular for CG character animation, there have not been any practical systems that can appropriately handle the kinematic and dynamic conditions required for moving actual biped robots stably without falling down. In our interface, every time a key pose is created, modified or removed, the system immediately processes automatic trajectory adjustment of the feet and the waist so that the key poses and the interpolated motion can always meet the conditions. This enables a user to edit variety of motions in an intuitive and flexible way without paying attention to the conditions. We implemented the interface and confirmed that characteristic whole body motions of a realistic humanoid robot HRP-4C were easily created with it and the actual HRP-4C successfully performed them.