Multi-contact motion retargeting from human to humanoid robot

We propose a framework for real-time online and offline retargeting of a human actor motion to a humanoid robot motion involving multi-contact configuration changes between the human/humanoid and their environments. The framework is based on the specification within a multi-contact QP control formulation of tracking tasks for a selected set of body-segments/links, the ones either used for a manipulation task from a fixed multi-contact stance or susceptible to be used as contact supports or as locomotion supports on the environment in the course of the execution of the motion. The framework is applied in an online setting for simultaneous human-robot motion tracking (in the case of no contact configuration change) and in an offline setting for tracking the playback of the recorded human motion that is pre-processed to extract from it the sequence of contact change events as a necessary motion information exploited by the tracking algorithm. We present a real robot experiment with HRP-4 for the online setting and a dynamics simulation experiment for the offline setting to validate the proposed approach.