NAO Humanoid Robot Obstacle Avoidance Using Monocular Camera

The human like design and locomotion allow humanoids to perform complex motions. Humanoids are well suited for mobile manipulation tasks designed for humans like walking, accessing different types of terrain, navigating in complex environments such as environments with stairs and/or narrow passages, navigating through cluttered environments without colliding with objects, etc. In this work, we introduce an integrated approach that enables NAO humanoid to plan and successfully execute whole body motions including stepping over, climbing up/down obstacles, as well as climbing up/down straight staircase using only onboard sensing. NAO is able to walk on multiple floor surfaces such as carpet, tiles and wooden floors, it can transit between these surfaces while walking. However, large obstacles can still make it fall, as it assumes that the ground is more or less flat.