Toward humanoid manipulation in human-centred environments

In order for humanoid robots to enter human-centred environments, it is indispensable to equip them with manipulative, perceptive and communicative skills necessary for real-time interaction with the environment and humans. The goal of our work is to provide reliable and highly integrated humanoid platforms which on the one hand allow the implementation and tests of various research activities and on the other hand the realization of service tasks in a household scenario. In this paper, we present a new humanoid robot currently being developed for applications in human-centred environments. In addition, we present an integrated grasping and manipulation system consisting of a motion planner for the generation of collision-free paths and a vision system for the recognition and localization of a subset of household objects as well as a grasp analysis component which provides the most feasible grasp configurations for each object. c © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.