Whole-body motion planning for pivoting based manipulation by humanoids

This paper emphasizes on the capacity of a humanoid robot to perform tasks that are difficult for other types of robots. It deals with manipulation of bulky objects. Such tasks require complicated manipulations involving the whole-body and fine coordination between legs, arms and torso motions. We introduce here a whole-body motion planner that allows a humanoid robot to autonomously plan a pivoting strategy that accounts for the various constraints: collision avoidance, legs-arms coordination and stability control. Based on a previous result by the authors [1] proving the small-time controllability of a pivoting system, the planner is proven to inherit from the probabilistic completeness of the sampling-based motion planning method it is built on. The geometric and kinematic capacity of the proposed planner is mainly demonstrated through simulations and experiments.