A Behavior Architecture for Fast Humanoid Robot Door Traversals

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive architecture enabling humanoid robots to efficiently perceive, plan, and execute door traversals across various types, integrating GPU-accelerated perception, behavior trees, and whole-body manipulation for rapid, reusable actions.

Contribution

It presents a novel, layered behavior architecture combining perception, planning, and control for fast, adaptable door traversal in humanoid robots, supporting rapid behavior authoring and reusability.

Findings

Successful real-world door traversal demonstrations

Effective perception combining neural networks and classical vision

Rapid behavior authoring for unseen door types

Abstract

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.