Manipulation of documented objects by a walking humanoid robot

This paper deals with manipulation task planning for a humanoid robot while stepping. It introduces the concept of “documented” objects, i.e. objects that provide information on how to manipulate them. The planning phase is decoupled into two parts. First a random motion planner uses the documentation of the object to quickly plan a collision free motion for a simplified model of the robot manipulating the object. Then an inverse kinematics solver animates the whole set of the robot´s degrees of freedom by converting the simplified path into time parametrized tasks. Several examples show the generalization of the method.