Humanoid whole-body planning for loco-manipulation tasks

We consider the problem of planning whole-body motions for humanoids that must execute loco-manipulation tasks, i.e., manipulation tasks that implicitly require a locomotion phase. The proposed planner builds a tree in configuration-time space by concatenating feasible, collision-free whole-body motions that realize a succession of CoM movement primitives and, at the same time, the assigned manipulation task. To obtain fluid, natural motions we identify three zones of operation, i.e, locomotion, loco-manipulation and manipulation, and we carefully design a mechanism that allows to synchronize the two tasks. The proposed method has been implemented in V-REP for the NAO humanoid and successfully tested in various scenarios of increasing complexity.