Autonomous car driving by a humanoid robot

Abstract

Enabling a humanoid robot to drive a car requires the development of a set of basic primitive actions. These include walking to the vehicle, manually controlling its commands (e.g., ignition, gas pedal, and steering) and moving with the whole body to ingress/egress the car. We present a sensor‐based reactive framework for realizing the central part of the complete task, consisting of driving the car along unknown roads. The proposed framework provides three driving strategies by which a human supervisor can teleoperate the car or give the robot full or partial control of the car. A visual servoing scheme uses features of the road image to provide the reference angle for the steering wheel to drive the car at the center of the road. Simultaneously, a Kalman filter merges optical flow and accelerometer measurements to estimate the car linear velocity and correspondingly compute the gas pedal command for driving at a desired speed. The steering wheel and gas pedal reference are sent to the robot control to achieve the driving task with the humanoid. We present results from a driving experience with a real car and the humanoid robot HRP‐2Kai. Part of the framework has been used to perform the driving task at the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

Vision-Based Navigation of Omnidirectional Mobile Robots

“…In this case, we use the acceleration measured by the IMU in the filter prediction, to propagate an initial estimation of the robot velocity. Filter updates are obtained through the robot differential kinematics, relying on encoders data, and an estimation of the robot velocity based on optical flow [15] [16]. This last estimation comes at no additional computational cost since the optical flow is also computed to detect obstacles (see Sect.…”

A circuit-breaker use-case operated by a humanoid in aircraft manufacturing

“…What makes humanoids a plausible perspective for their deployment in aerospace -or other large-scale productsmanufacturing, is their ability to use multi-contact technology, which has been the focus of our research and development in the past years [7][6] [5], see also 4 . Indeed, humanoid locomotion in cluttered environment exploits possible sequence of contact creations and removals between any part of the robot and the environment to plan motions.…”

“…Recently the DARPA robotic challenge 2 opened potential applications in rescue and disaster operations. Yet the contest brought into light the gap that remains to overcome in order to efficiently deploy such a technology outdoor and achieve complex tasks such as driving [4] or ladder climbing [5]. During the two previous years, we focused our efforts on applications of humanoids in manufacturing.…”

Nut fastening with a humanoid robot

“…It has been shown that those robots are able to execute tasks which are mostly done by humans in today's industrial world. Their anthropomorphic structure and diverse sensory feedback enables walking on uneven terrains [1], climbing ladders [2], driving cars [3] and many other tasks as seen e.g. in the DARPA robotics challenge.…”