@Article{paolillo:jfr:2018, author = {Paolillo, Antonio and Gergondet, Pierre and Cherubini, Andrea and Vendittelli, Marilena and Kheddar, Abderrahmane}, title = {Autonomous car driving by a humanoid robot}, journal = {Journal of Field Robotics}, year = {2018}, volume = {35}, number = {2}, pages = {169--186}, month = {March}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1002/rob.21731}, url = {https://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/rob.21731}, keywords = {autonomous driving, humanoid robots, visual control}, abstract = {Enabling a humanoid robot to drive a car requires the development of a set of basic primitive actions. These include walking to the vehicle, manually controlling its commands (e.g., ignition, gas pedal, and steering) and moving with the whole body to ingress/egress the car. We present a sensor-based reactive framework for realizing the central part of the complete task, consisting of driving the car along unknown roads. The proposed framework provides three driving strategies by which a human supervisor can teleoperate the car or give the robot full or partial control of the car. A visual servoing scheme uses features of the road image to provide the reference angle for the steering wheel to drive the car at the center of the road. Simultaneously, a Kalman filter merges optical flow and accelerometer measurements to estimate the car linear velocity and correspondingly compute the gas pedal command for driving at a desired speed. The steering wheel and gas pedal reference are sent to the robot control to achieve the driving task with the humanoid. We present results from a driving experience with a real car and the humanoid robot HRP-2Kai. Part of the framework has been used to perform the driving task at the DARPA Robotics Challenge.}, publisher = {Wiley}, address = {111 River St, Hoboken 07030-5774, NJ, USA} }