Mobile manipulation of humanoid robots -control method for accurate manipulation

A control method for humanoid robots of mobile manipulation is proposed: this method allows accurate manipulation using hands, even when the robots move around. A robot controls its body pose and steps so that manipulabilities of both arms and robot stability can increase, coordinating with the motion of both hands for performing objective tasks. Because of the vibration caused by the impact of foot landing and the slip of the feet, the accuracy of the hand positions and robot stability decrease. For this problem, the robot measures real hand positions and body orientation with its camera and gyroscope. Then the hand positions errors are transformed to correcting joint angles of the arms using arm Jacobian matrices. Adding the calculated joint angles to the desired joint angles of the arms, the arms can compensate the hand positions. New desired joint angles of the legs are calculated by inverse kinematics from real foot positions and desired shoulder position. Adding the correcting joint angles to the desired joint angles of the legs, the legs can compensate the shoulder position, thus increasing robot stability. The effectiveness of the proposed method is ascertained by simulations.