Article on Robotics

Humanoid service robots performing complex object manipulation tasks need to plan whole-body motions that satisfy a variety of constraints: The robot must keep its balance, self-collisions and collisions with obstacles in the environment must be avoided and, if applicable, the trajectory of the end-effector must follow the constrained motion of a manipulated object in Cartesian space. We present an approach to whole-body motion planning that is based on rapidly-exploring random trees in combination with inverse kinematics. Using our system, humanoids are able to plan motions so as to open drawer, doors, and picking up objects.