NAO humanoid climbing a full spiral staircase autonomously

This video shows our laser-equipped Nao humanoid climbing a spiral
staircase. Details will be presented in the paper "Improved Proposals for Highly Accurate Localization Using Range and Vision Data" by
Stefan Oßwald, Armin Hornung, and Maren Bennewitz at the IROS 2012 conference.

The robot integrates observations from the laser range
scanner on top of its head with observations from the camera located
in its lower head. By consistently matching the known staircase model
to a set of images acquired on each step, the robot is able to accurately
locate itself towards the stairs and to climb them reliably.

See http://hrl.informatik.uni-freiburg.de... for more information.

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Shaun Gruver]

Hey, what's that thing on his head?

[HumanoidsFreiburg]

This is a Hokuyo laser range finder, which we use for 3D perception (see "Plane segmentation for climbing stairs" in our other videos).

[Ryuuken24]

Honda did it in 2009, and it can run since 2010. So NAO is hanging behind quite a lot. Didn't Honda also manage to identify objects and people.. Hm, NAO is diffidently behind the future.

[HumanoidsFreiburg]

In many of the popular Asimo demonstrations, the robots are acting only semi-autonomously and little sophisticated sensing is involved. Have you ever seen Asimo traverse a complex spiral staircase? Of course Nao is a mechanically simpler design, you're comparing a robot for > 1 Mio $ to one for 15.000$. Here, Nao autonomously corrects for its motion drift (from inaccurate execution) and is able to localize with a high accuracy, despite the comparably low-cost hardware and complex environment.

[Ryuuken24]

I didn't think money at all. Asimo's worth has actually gone way up. For what Nao does, it's pretty good. Hehe. I'm still waiting for robots to have a GPU + CPU. Thanks for making things more clear for me. I do have a question, why doesn't NAO repeat the same action for the first 3 steps, since they are the same, instead of re-reading then proceed to move? Thanks again!

[HumanoidsFreiburg]

Of course we could have hard-coded it for the first steps completely without sensing (in fact, we did just that in our first stair climbing video). But we wanted a robust and general solution, the staircase could have an arbitrary (and irregular) shape here. Thus, there's a sensing and correction part on every step so that Nao re-positions in the center of the step. Otherwise it's risking a fall after 3 steps already.

[Michelle White]

An it took you a couple of years to start walking, inadequate human.

[Gozilla1014]

"Robot can you bring me a sandwich from the freezer downstairs?" "Yes master."

30 min later.... "1 million Dollar wasted. Great"

[MildBut Wild]

Inventors never saw the irony calling it NAO that rhymes so much with Now?

Master: Come here, Nao!

Robo: Yes master. Coming

Half an hour later.

Master: "I SAID COME HERE, NOW!!"

Robo: Yes master. Coming

22 years later.... "Here I Am!! .. ohhh...R.I.P. Master"

[imablue1]

its awesome, but he sure is taking his time...

[Carlos Osorio]

you mean $16000 ...

[MrLukeRob]

Technik wird dem leben immer unterlegen bleiben

[NuroBlog]

Looks like a clay animation

[SAIIIURAI]

What a waste of time ...it hurts to watch this thing!! Instead to invast in that stupid slowmo step robot build a MF hi tech exoskellet!! i want more exoskellets !!!

[Elias Ulrich]

xD my Grandma ist faster