Optimization-based whole-body motion planning for humanoid robots

Abstract

Motion planning is a prerequisite capability for the robots for applications in transportation, exploration, and search-and-rescue missions. The overall objective of motion planning is to enable robots to plan the low-level motions needed to accomplish assigned high-level tasks autonomously or under human supervision. According to the lessons we learned from the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), we have high confidence that the motion planner we designed in the DRC is an appropriate and powerful tool to plan the manipulation motions for high degree of freedom (DOF) robot systems.