Planning humanoid motions with striding ability in a virtual environment

Enabling a humanoid robot to move autonomously in a real-life environment presents a challenging problem. Unlike traditional wheeled robots, legged robots such as humanoid robots have advanced abilities of stepping over an object or striding over a deep gap with versatile locomotions. However, only few humanoid researches today have addressed this problem. In this paper, we consider the problem of planning a humanoid robot's motion in a layered environment cluttered with obstacles and deep narrow gaps. We extend the motion planning system for humanoids in our previous work to account for multiple locomotions and striding ability for a humanoid robot. Each locomotion corresponds to a tier in the search space, and the tiers are connected at the locations where motion transitions are possible. According to a humanoid's geometric properties, such as maximal gait size and step height, we propose to apply the closing morphological operator to the workspace bitmap to compute the reachability region for a humanoid with striding ability. Our experiments show that our system is efficient in generating versatile motions for a humanoid to reach its goal in a complex environment.