Continuous trajectory optimization for autonomous humanoid door opening

The upcoming DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) presents a demanding set of real-world tasks to be accomplished autonomously by robots. In this paper, we describe the development of a system to control an existing humanoid robot to open a door, one of the many tasks of the DRC. Special emphasis is placed upon generating smooth trajectories which minimize unnecessary motion of the robot. We describe methods for generating and optimizing trajectories for the robot, and present preliminary results demonstrated on the physical robotic platform. To the best of our knowledge, we demonstrate the first large scale application of the CHOMP trajectory optimization in a situation with closed kinematic chain constraints.