Unified Multi-Contact Fall Mitigation Planning for Humanoids via Contact Transition Tree Optimization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a unified planning framework for humanoid fall mitigation that combines inertial shaping, protective stepping, and hand contacts through contact transition tree optimization, enabling complex stabilization strategies.

Contribution

It develops a contact transition tree approach that unifies multiple fall mitigation strategies and optimizes contact sequences and robot trajectories simultaneously.

Findings

Successfully generates complex stabilization strategies in simulation.

Handles varying initial pushes and environment shapes.

Improves fall mitigation planning efficiency.

Abstract

This paper presents a multi-contact approach to generalized humanoid fall mitigation planning that unifies inertial shaping, protective stepping, and hand contact strategies. The planner optimizes both the contact sequence and the robot state trajectories. A high-level tree search is conducted to iteratively grow a contact transition tree. At each edge of the tree, trajectory optimization is used to calculate robot stabilization trajectories that produce the desired contact transition while minimizing kinetic energy. Also, at each node of the tree, the optimizer attempts to find a self-motion (inertial shaping movement) to eliminate kinetic energy. This paper also presents an efficient and effective method to generate initial seeds to facilitate trajectory optimization. Experiments demonstrate show that our proposed algorithm can generate complex stabilization strategies for a simulated robot under varying initial pushes and environment shapes.