Abstract
Enabling a humanoid robot to drive a car, requires the development of a set of basic primitive actions. These include: walking to the vehicle, manually controlling its commands (e.g., ignition, gas pedal and steering), and moving with the whole-body, to ingress/egress the car. In this paper, we present a sensor-based reactive framework for realizing the central part of the complete task, consisting in driving the car along unknown roads. The proposed framework provides three driving strategies by which a human supervisor can teleoperate the car, ask for assistive driving, or give the robot full control of the car. A visual servoing scheme uses features of the road image to provide the reference angle for the steering wheel to drive the car at the center of the road. Simultaneously , a Kalman filter merges optical flow and accelerometer measurements, to estimate the car linear velocity and correspondingly compute the gas pedal command for driving at a desired speed. The steering wheel and gas pedal reference are sent to the robot control to achieve the driving task with the hu-manoid. We present results from a driving experience with a real car and the humanoid robot HRP-2Kai. Part of the framework has been used to perform the driving task at the DARPA Robotics Challenge.