Some challenging issues in humanoid robotics

After a quick review of advanced achievements from the hardware point‐of‐view and a short overview of trends and possible applications of humanoids, we will address specific problems that we are dealing with at the AIST/CNRS Joint Japanese‐French Robotics Laboratory (JRL). We believe autonomy is a common challenge in indoor and outdoor humanoids and several efforts are dedicated to fill the gap between the hardware capabilities and actual achievements (the latter are yet very limited). We are developing efforts in planning of contact support stances that can occur between any part of the humanoid's bodies and any part of the environment; this is to build a richer behavior of acyclic motion. At a lower level, we are also dealing with task description, complex motion optimization and advanced tools for simulation with interactive and haptic feedback. The talk will end by emphasizing on the multidisciplinary link of humanoid research to other fields.