[Thesis proposal] Seeing the Future: Integrating Perception & Planning for Humanoid Autonomy

Author:
Philipp Michel
Robotics Institute
Carnegie Mellon University

Abstract:
Today's agile humanoid robots are testament to the impressive advances in the design of biped mechanisms and control in recent robotics history. The big challenge, however, remains to properly exploit the generality and flexibility of humanoid platforms during fully autonomous operation in obstacle-filled and dynamically changing environments. Increasing effort has thus been focused on the challenges arising for perception and motion planning, as well as the interplay between both, as foundations of humanoid autonomy.

This thesis will explore appropriate approaches to perception on humanoids and ways of coupling sensing and planning to generate navigation and manipulation strategies that can be executed reliably. We investigate perception methods employing on- and off-body sensors that are combined with an efficient motion planner to allow the humanoid robot HRP-2 and Honda's ASIMO to traverse complex and unpredictably changing environments. We examine how predictive information about the future state of the world gathered from observation enables navigation in the presence of challenging moving obstacles. We will show how programmable graphics hardware can be exploited to robustly address the difficulties of real-time sensing specifically encountered on a locomoting humanoid. Using the humanoid robot ARMAR-III as a motivating example, we argue furthermore that reliability of autonomous operation can be improved by reasoning about perception during the planning process, rather than maintaining the traditional separation of the sensing and planning stages.

We review our motivation, current work and proposed research on the integration of perception and planning toward the eventual goal of allowing humanoids to operate autonomously and reliably in the real world.