Abstract — We present an approach to navigating a biped robot safely and efficiently through a complicated environment of previously unknown obstacles and terrain using only onboard sensing and odometry. Sensing of the environment is performed by a pivoting laser scanner, which continues to update the terrain representation as the robot walks. Safe stepping motions are planned from this data to follow the user’s command, given in the form of an end goal, a rough path, or a joystick input. Results are demonstrated on a prototype robot in several environments. I.

Abstract — We present a new biped walking pattern generator based on “half-steps”. Its key features are a) a 3-dimensional parametrization of the input space, and b) a simple homotopy that efficiently smooths the walking trajectory corresponding to a fixed sequence of steps. We show how these features can be ideally combined in the framework of sampling-based footstep planning. We apply our approach to the robot HRP-2 and are able to quickly produce smooth and dynamically stable trajectories that are solutions to a difficult problem of footstep planning.