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.