This paper presents a work toward the old dream of the housekeeping robot. One humanoid robot will cooperate with the user to cook simple dishes. The system combines predefined tasks and dialogues to find a plan in which both robot and user help each other in the kitchen. The kitchen problem allows the demonstration of a large variety of actions, and then the necessity to find and to plan those actions. With this problem the task planner can be fully used to enhance the robot reasoning capacity. Furthermore the robot must also use motion planning to have general procedures to cope with the action planned. We focus on the planning problems and the interactions of these two planning methods

This paper describes vision-based 3D walking system of a humanoid robot by combining a precise 3D planar surface detection method and a practical 3D footstep planner method. The walking control system requires vision system with 10[mm] accuracy. Then we developed the precise 3D planar surface recognition system by combining the 3D Hough transformation method and the robust estimation method. We also developed practical 3D foot step planner by considering kinematics and dynamics restriction of robot hardware. Finally, we realized vision based 3D walking experiments that a humanoid robot steps upon an unknown obstacle are shown.

This paper describes the design and development of system software for humanoid robots such that researchers who specialize not only in biped walking but also in various fields are able to use humanoid robots as a research tool. For this purpose, the system for a humanoid must integrate and organize each subsystem such as control, recognition, dialogue, planning and so on, and it must provide efficient full-body motion control by specifying fewer degrees of freedom than all joints. Our system design provides a common interface among subsystems by implementing each function as a method call through a three-dimensional model of the robot for good integration, and it also provides a motion planning technique based full-body posture sequence and walking pattern generation. Finally, we show integrated behavior experiments with vision, planning and motion control using the developed system software for a life-sized humanoid robot, HRP2.

In this paper, we describe a planner for a humanoid robot that is capable of finding a path in an environment with movable objects, whereas previous motion planner only deals with an environment with fixed objects. We address an environment manipulation problem for a humanoid robot that finds a walking path from the given start location to the goal location while displacing obstructing objects on the walking path. This problem requires more complex configuration space than previous researches using a mobile robot especially in a manipulation phase, since a humanoid robot has many degrees of freedom in its arm than a forklift type robot. Our approach is to build environment manipulation task graph that decompose the given task into subtasks which are solved using navigation path planner or whole body motion planner. We also propose a standing location search and a displacing obstacle location search for connecting subtasks. Efficient method to solve manipulation planning that relies on whole body inverse kinematics and motion planning technology is also shown. Finally, we show experimental results in an environment with movable objects such as chairs and trash boxes. The planner finds an action sequence consists of walking paths and manipulating obstructing objects to walk from the start position to the goal position.