Coupling manipulation and locomotion tasks for a humanoid robot

This work deals with the use of tools from robotics for generating whole-body movements on anthropomorphic systems. The problem of coordinating the whole-body joints in order to combine manipulation and locomotion tasks is considered. Using inverse kinematics, the main scientific challenge comes from redundancy. We tackle it by considering a main equality task and additional inequality constraints. These secondary constraints are expressed by repulsive and attractive potential functions. Using this type of function, we provide a relaxation on the positioning of the projected center of mass into the support polygon, in order to increase the accessibility of the robot during reaching tasks. These methods were implemented on Matlab and the motion was simulated on the dynamic simulator OpenHRP of the HRP2 humanoid robot.