One of the most common effects in the animated feature film Quantum Quest are the trails that fall behind and twisted around all photon characters, including the hero character Dave (Figure 1). The quantity of shots that required this effect warranted the development

Enabling a humanoid robot to move autonomously in a real-life environment presents a challenging problem. Unlike traditional wheeled robots, legged robots such as humanoid robots have advanced abilities of stepping over an object or striding over a deep gap with versatile locomotions. However, only few humanoid researches today have addressed this problem. In this paper, we consider the problem of planning a humanoid robot's motion in a layered environment cluttered with obstacles and deep narrow gaps. We extend the motion planning system for humanoids in our previous work to account for multiple locomotions and striding ability for a humanoid robot. Each locomotion corresponds to a tier in the search space, and the tiers are connected at the locations where motion transitions are possible. According to a humanoid's geometric properties, such as maximal gait size and step height, we propose to apply the closing morphological operator to the workspace bitmap to compute the reachability region for a humanoid with striding ability. Our experiments show that our system is efficient in generating versatile motions for a humanoid to reach its goal in a complex environment.

Motion planning is one of the key capabilities for autonomous humanoid robots. Previous researches have focused on weight balancing, collision detection, and gait generation. Most planners either assume that the environment can be simplified to a 2D workspace or assume that the path is given. In this paper, we propose a motion planning system capable of generating both global and local motions for a humanoid robot in a layered or two and half dimensional environment. The planner can generate a gross motion that moves the humanoid vertically as well as horizontally to avoid obstacles in the environments. The gross motion is further realized by a local planner that determines the most efficient footsteps and locomotion over uneven terrain. If the local planner fails, the failure is feedback to the global planner to consider other alternative paths. The implemented humanoid planning system is an interactive tool that can compute collision-free motions for a humanoid robot in an online manner.