Abstract
With the increase of the number of humanoid robots, the importance in developing a motion planning and synthesis tool that can easily be dealt by general users without a long training process have been growing for a wide range of applications. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel user interface allowing whole-body motion planning and synthesis for humanoid robots. Our interface consists of two fundamental elements. The first element is a process for automatically constructing a 2D graphical interface from a variety of motion data by using a dimensionality reduction method so that all topological features of each motion and similarities among different motions are preserved. With the constructed interface, the user can synthesize a variety of whole-body motions by simply following the lines on the plane. The second element is a motion-interpolation process for the synthesized motions even if the user roughly indicates motions by the interface. These elements allow to synthesize smooth and naturally-looking whole body motions even by a general user. We developed a system composed of a tablet-type input device and a small humanoid robot for the validation of our method. Through experiments with human subjects, the effectiveness of the proposed approach was validated.
