Humanoid teleoperation for whole body manipulation

Abstract

We present results of successful telemanipulation of large, heavy objects by a humanoid robot. Using a single joystick the operator controls walking and whole body manipulation along arbitrary paths for up to ten minutes of continuous execution. The robot grasps, walks, pushes, pulls, turns and re-grasps a 55kg range of loads on casters. Our telemanipulation framework changes reference frames online to let the operator steer the robot in free walking, its hands in grasping and the object during mobile manipulation. In the case of manipulation, our system computes a robot motion that satisfies the commanded object path as well as the kinematic and dynamic constraints of the robot. Furthermore, we achieve increased robot stability by learning dynamic friction models of manipulated objects.