Sensor-Based Humanoid Walking

Robert Cupec was a researcher on project Sensor-Based Humanoid Walking at Technische Universität München (TUM), Institute of Automatic Control Engineering (Lehrstuhl für Steuerungs- und Regelungstechnik - LSR), Germany funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft - DFG). Project leader was Prof. Dr.-Ing. Dr.-Ing. hc. Günther Schmidt and the members of the research team were Dr. -Ing. Robert Cupec, Dr. -Ing. Oliver Lorch, Dr. –Ing. Joachim Denk and Dr. –Ing. Javier F. Seara. The goal of the project was to implement an intelligent navigation system for humanoid robots which included vision-based perception as well as step sequence planning. The vision system developed by the LSR team was used to control a full scale humanoid robot Johnnie built by TUM, Institute for Applied Mechanics. The leader of the research team which constructed Johnnie was Prof. Dr.-Ing., Dr.-Ing. E.h., Dr. h.c. mult. Friedrich Pfeiffer and its members were Dr. –Ing. Michael Gienger and Dr. –Ing. Klaus Löffler. The results of the project were presented in April 2003 on Hannover fair. Sixty presentations were performed in which Johnnie walked autonomously in a structured scenario guided by the vision system in front of a live audience.