Abstract: To realize grasping manipulation effectively in practical application, whole-body motion planning should be designed for humanoid robots. Thus, degrees of freedom of all the joints in humanoid robots, and constraints of robots, environment and the physical characteristics of grasped objects should be taken into consideration. To solve the problems including multi degrees of freedom and complex constraints, a new planning method is designed by using bidirectional RRT algorithm. After receiving stable double-leg configurations and the list of grasping hand’s poses, the bidirectional RRT algorithm is adopted to realize the whole-body motion planning for humanoid robots. Some experiments are conducted to make a NAO humanoid robot to open a drawer, enables to open a drawer in the presence of obstacles, and open a drawer for taking an object, and close the drawer. The results indicate that the whole-body motion planning with bidirectional RRT algorithm is effective in achieving the grasping manipulation of humanoid robots.

Key words: humanoid robot, whole-body motion planning, grasp, rapidly-exploring random trees (RRTs), NAO