To generate the walking path of a humanoid robot in an unknown environment, the shapes of obstacles around the robot should be detected accurately. However, doing so incurs a very large computational cost. Therefore this study proposes a method to classify the obstacle shape into three types: a shape small enough for the robot to go over, a shape planar enough for the robot foot to make contact with, and an uncertain shape that must be avoided by the robot. To classify the obstacle shape, first, the range and the number of the obstacles is detected. If an obstacle can make contact with the robot foot, the shape of an obstacle is accurately derived. If an obstacle has uncertain shape or small size, the shape of an obstacle is not detected to minimize the computational load. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm efficiently classifies the shapes of obstacles around the robot in real time with low computational load.
This paper proposes a method to extract accurate plane of an object in unstructured environment for a humanoid robot by using a laser scanner. By panning and tilting 2D laser scanner installed on the head of a humanoid robot, 3D depth map of unstructured environment is generated. After generating the 3D depth map around a robot, the proposed plane extraction method is applied to the 3D depth map. By using the hierarchical clustering method, points on the same plane are extracted from the point cloud in the 3D depth map. After segmenting the plane from the point cloud, dimensions of the planes are calculated. The accuracy of the extracted plane is evaluated with experimental results, which show the effectiveness of the proposed method to extract planes around a humanoid robot in unstructured environment.
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