Motion Planning and Collision Avoidance Strategy by Contact Interaction in Humanoid Robot Navigation

This paper present analyses of collision avoidance strategy in conjunction with motion planning in contact interaction based navigation system for humanoid robot. We developed the navigation system based on contact interaction to support and improve current visual-based navigation. In our approach, motion planning is design based on contact interaction of the robot arms to perform searching, touching and grasping motion in order to recognize its surrounding condition. Meanwhile, the collision checking is performed by searching motion of the robot's arms that created a radius of detection area within the arm's reach, which considered as collision free area when no object is detected. We conducted geometrical analysis using Rapid-2D software to define absolute collision free trajectory area in bipedal walking motion of humanoid robot Bonten-Maru II. The analysis result revealed optimum step size of humanoid robot to perform biped walk in various directions. Performance of the proposed collision avoidance strategy was verified in experiment with humanoid robot Bonten-Maru II to operate in a room with wall and obstacles, which results revealed good performance of the robot navigation.