Vision-based obstacle avoidance navigation with autonomous humanoid robots for structured competition problems

Biped humanoid robots have been developed to successfully perform human-like locomotion. Based on the use of well-developed locomotion control systems, humanoid robots are further expected to achieve high-level intelligence, such as vision-based obstacle avoidance navigation. To provide standard obstacle avoidance navigation problems for autonomous humanoid robot researches, the HuroCup League of Federation of International Robot-Soccer Association (FIRA) and the RoboCup Humanoid League defined the conditions and rules in competitions to evaluate the performance. In this paper, the vision-based obstacle avoidance navigation approaches for humanoid robots were proposed in terms of combining the techniques of visual localization, obstacle map construction and artificial potential field (APF)-based reactive navigations. Moreover, a small-size humanoid robot (HuroEvolution^JR) and an adult-size humanoid robot (HuroEvolution^AD) were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed obstacle avoidance navigation approach. The navigation performance was evaluated with the distance of ground truth trajectory collected from a motion capture system. Finally, the experiment results demonstrated the effectiveness of using vision-based localization and obstacle map construction approaches. Moreover, the APF-based navigation approach was capable of achieving smaller trajectory distance when compared to conventional just-avoiding-nearest-obstacle-rule approach.