Whole-body motion planning for humanoid robots with heuristic search

The task of whole-body motion planning for humanoid robots is challenging due to its high-DOF nature, stability constraints, and the need for obstacle avoidance and movements that are efficient. Over the years, various approaches have been adopted to solve this problem such as bounding-box models and jacobian-based techniques. More commonly though, sampling-based algorithms are employed for this task since they perform admirably well in high-dimensional spaces. As an alternative, search-based planners offer improvements in terms of optimality and consistency of the solution. However, they are normally considered impractical for high-dimensional motion planning. In this paper, we present a heuristic search-based motion planning framework for humanoid robots that circumvents the drawbacks traditionally associated with search-based planners while catering to the specific requirements of humanoid motion planning. This is achieved primarily through a combination of informative yet computationally inexpensive heuristics, carefully crafted motion primitives as atomic actions, and a whole body inverse kinematics solver for achieving desired end effector orientations. The experimental results show the ability of our framework to perform complex motion planning tasks quickly and efficiently.