Vision-guided humanoid footstep planning for dynamic environments

Despite the stable walking capabilities of modern biped humanoid robots, their ability to autonomously and safely navigate obstacle-filled, unpredictable environments has so far been limited. We present an approach to autonomous humanoid walking that combines vision-based sensing with a footstep planner, allowing the robot to navigate toward a desired goal position while avoiding obstacles. An environment map including the robot, goal, and obstacle locations is built in real-time from vision. The footstep planner then computes an optimal sequence of footstep locations within a time-limited planning horizon. Footstep plans are reused and only partially recomputed as the environment changes during the walking sequence. In our experiments, combining real-time vision with plan reuse has allowed a Honda ASIMO humanoid robot to autonomously traverse dynamic environments containing unpredictably moving obstacles