A Behavior Architecture for Fast Humanoid Robot Door Traversals

• Main Authors: Calvert, Duncan, Penco, Luigi, Anderson, Dexton, Bialek, Tomasz, Chatterjee, Arghya, Mishra, Bhavyansh, Clark, Geoffrey, Bertrand, Sylvain, Griffin, Robert
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 05-11-2024
• Subjects: Computer Science - Robotics
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2411.03532

Towards the role of humanoid robots as squad mates in urban operations and
other domains, we identified doors as a major area lacking capability
development. In this paper, we focus on the ability of humanoid robots to
navigate and deal with doors. Human-sized doors are ubiquitous in many
environment domains and the humanoid form factor is uniquely suited to operate
and traverse them. We present an architecture which incorporates GPU
accelerated perception and a tree based interactive behavior coordination
system with a whole body motion and walking controller. Our system is capable
of performing door traversals on a variety of door types. It supports rapid
authoring of behaviors for unseen door types and techniques to achieve
re-usability of those authored behaviors. The behaviors are modelled using
trees and feature logical reactivity and action sequences that can be executed
with layered concurrency to increase speed. Primitive actions are built on top
of our existing whole body controller which supports manipulation while
walking. We include a perception system using both neural networks and
classical computer vision for door mechanism detection outside of the lab
environment. We present operator-robot interdependence analysis charts to
explore how human cognition is combined with artificial intelligence to produce
complex robot behavior. Finally, we present and discuss real robot performances
of fast door traversals on our Nadia humanoid robot. Videos online at
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXuyT8w3JVgMPaB5nWNRNHtqzRK8i68dy.