Paul Fitzpatrick, Kensuke Harada, Charles C. Kemp, Yoshio Matsumoto, Kazuhito Yokoi and Eiichi Yoshida
Humanoid robots selectively immitate aspects of human form and behavior. Humanoids come in a variety of shapes and sizes, from complete human-size legged robots to isolated robotic heads with human-like sensing and expression. This chapter highlights significant humanoid platforms and achievements, and discusses some of the underlying goals behind this area of robotics. Humanoids tend to require the integration ofmany of the methods covered in detail within other chapters of this handbook, so this chapter focuses on distinctive aspects of humanoid robotics with liberal cross-referencing.
This chapter examines what motivates researchers to pursue humanoid robotics, and provides a taste of the evolution of this field over time. It summarizes work on legged humanoid locomotion, whole-body activities, and approaches to human–robot communication. It concludes with a brief discussion of factors that may influence the future of humanoid robots.
3-D, collision-free motion combining locomotion and manipulation by humanoid robot HRP-2
Author Eiichi Yoshida
Video ID : 594
This video shows an example of 3-D, whole-body motion generation combining manipulation and dynamic biped locomotion, based on two-stage motion generation. At the first stage, the motion planner generates the upper-body motion with a walking path of the bounding box of the lower body. The second stage overlays the desired upper-body motion on the dynamically-stable walking motions generated by a dynamic walking-pattern generator, based on preview control of ZMP for a linear, inverted-pendulum model. If collisions occur, the planner goes back to the first stage to reshape the trajectory until collision-free motion is obtained.