Small-space controllability of a walking humanoid robot

This paper presents a two-stage motion planner for walking humanoid robots. A first draft path is computed using random motion planning techniques that ensure collision avoidance. In a second step, the draft path is approximated by a whole-body dynamically stable walk trajectory. The contributions of this work are: (i) a formal guarantee, based on small space controllability criteria, that the first draft path can be approximated by a collision-free dynamically stable trajectory; (ii) an algorithm that uses this theoretical property to find a solution trajectory. We have applied our method on several problems where whole-body planning and walk are needed, and the results have been validated on a real platform: the robot HRP-2.