On the Dualities Between Grasping and Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation Tasks

Exploiting interaction with the environment is a promising and powerful way to enhance stability of humanoid robots and robustness while executing locomotion and manipulation tasks. This paper revisits several of our works that have a point in common: the exploration of techniques commonly applied in the context of robot grasping with multifingered hands to be applied for whole-body poses during execution of loco-manipulation tasks. Exploiting the fact that the kinematic and dynamic structure of hands holding objects is very similar to the body balancing with multi-contacts, we show how we have defined a taxonomy of whole body poses that provide support to the body, we have used motion data analysis to automatically extract information of detected support poses and the motion transition between them, and we apply the concept of grasp affordances to associate whole-body affordances to an unknown scene. This work provides an overview of our works and proposes directions of promising research direction that is expected to provide meaningful results in the area humanoid robotics in the future.