Visually Guided Whole Body Interaction

We describe a system for visual interaction developed for humanoid robots. It enables the robot to interact with its environment using a smooth whole body motion control driven by stabilized visual targets. Targets are defined as visually extracted "proto-objects" and behavior-relevant object hypotheses and are stabilized by means of a short-term sensory memory. Selection mechanisms are used to switch between behavior alternatives for searching or tracking objects as well as different whole body motion strategies for reaching. The decision between different motion strategies like reaching with right or left hand or with and without walking is made based on internal predictions that use copies of the whole-body control algorithm. The results show robust object tracking and a smooth interaction behavior that includes a large variety of whole-body postures.