Planning of Joint Trajectories for Humanoid Robots Using B-Spline Wavelets

The formulation and optimization of joint trajectories for humanoid robots is quite different from this same task for standard robots because of the complexity of the humanoid robots’ kinematics. In this paper we exploit the similarity between the movements of a humanoid robot and human movements to generate joint trajectories for such robots. In particular, we show how to transform human motion information captured by an optical tracking device into a high dimensional trajectory of a humanoid robot. We utilize B-spline wavelets to efficiently represent the joint trajectories and to automatically select the density of the basis functions on the time axis. We applied our method to the task of teaching a humanoid robot how to make a dance movement.