Greetings,
I'd like to announce some new humanoid/biped motion planning capabilities we've been working on for MoveIt! in collaboration with the University of Tokyo JSK Laboratories. We've implemented a proof-of-concept whole body motion planner for the HRP2 robot that combines JSK's lisp-based biped solvers and expertise with the power of OMPL and MoveIt!.
The changes include:
- New KinematicBase API that allows multiple tips to optionally be used in inverse kinematic solvers
- Various changes throughout MoveIt! to support whole-body IK solvers
- New IK solver plugin that creates a ROS service call to allow non-C++ solvers
- Custom constraint sampler for MoveIt! that enforces orientation constraints on torso virtual joint and samples leg positions using an IK solver
- Custom planning request adapter that adds valid walking steps to a generated trajectory from an external walking generator
- Custom interpolation method that applies a constraint to keep feet above the ground between sampled states
An overview of the HRP2 Integration (attached):
These are still preliminary implementation results with many limitations. You can find the custom HRP2 MoveIt! plugins
here.
Future work:
- Bias walking exploration before arm manipulation exploration
- Stability checking and planning with dynamics
- Integrated footstep planning - may require hierarchical planners
- Create example code using non-close licensed humanoid robot model (SampleRobot or HRP-4C)
Note: many of the 16 pull requests to the MoveIt code base are still under review.
Many thanks to the members of the JSK including:
- Dr. Kei Okada
- Dr. Masayuki Inaba
- Shintaro Noda
- Shunichi Nozawa
- Eisoku Kuroiwa
- Masaki Murooka
- Ryohei Ueda