Multi-contact vertical ladder climbing with an HRP-2 humanoid

Joris Vaillant (1, 2) , Abderrahmane Kheddar (1, 2) , Hervé Audren (1) , François Keith (2) , Stanislas Brossette (1) , Adrien Escande (1) , Karim Bouyarmane (3) , Kenji Kaneko (1) , Mitsuharu Morisawa (4) , Pierre Gergondet (2, 1) , Eiichi Yoshida (1) , Suuji Kajita (4) , Fumio Kanehiro (4)

1 CNRS-AIST JRL - Joint Robotics Laboratory
2 IDH - Interactive Digital Humans
3 ATR Computational Neuroscience Lab
4 AIST - National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology

We describe the research and the integration methods we developed to make the HRP-2 humanoid robot climb vertical industrial-norm ladders. We use our multi-contact planner and multi-objective closed-loop control for-mulated as a QP (quadratic program). First, a set of contacts to climb the ladder is planned off-line (automatically or by the user). These contacts are provided as an input for a finite state machine. The latter builds supplementary tasks that account for geometric uncertainties and specific grasps procedures to be added to the QP controller. The latter provides instant desired states in terms of joint accelerations and contact forces to be tracked by the embedded low-level motor controllers. Our trials revealed that hardware changes are necessary, and parts of software must be made more robust. Yet, we confirmed that HRP-2 has the kinematic and power capabilities to climb real industrial ladders, such as those found in nuclear power plants and large scale manufacturing factories (e.g. aircraft, shipyard) and construction sites.

Domaines: Robotique [cs.RO]; Automatique / Robotique

Joris Vaillant, Abderrahmane Kheddar, Hervé Audren, François Keith, Stanislas Brossette, et al.. Multi-contact vertical ladder climbing with an HRP-2 humanoid. Autonomous Robots, 2016, 40 (3), pp.561-580. ⟨10.1007/s10514-016-9546-4⟩. ⟨hal-01276931⟩