Whole-body motion planning for manipulation of articulated objects

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. These constraints and the high number of degrees of freedom make whole-body motion planning for humanoids a challenging problem. In this paper, we present an approach to whole-body motion planning with a focus on the manipulation of articulated objects such as doors and drawers. Our approach is based on rapidly-exploring random trees in combination with inverse kinematics and considers all required constraints during the search. Models of articulated objects hereby generate hand poses for sampled configurations along the trajectory of the object handle. We thoroughly evaluated our planning system and present experiments with a Nao humanoid opening a drawer, a door, and picking up an object. The experiments demonstrate the ability of our framework to generate solutions to complex planning problems and furthermore show that these plans can be reliably executed even on a low-cost humanoid platform.