Visible-Reachable Workspace for Perception-Aware Humanoid Design

Abstract

Workspace analysis measures where a robot can place its end effector. For visually guided manipulation, reachability alone is insufficient: a kinematically reachable target may not be visible in the specific pose required to reach it. The robot must then redirect its sensing or move its body to acquire a view, turning a perception limitation into additional motion. Existing humanoids largely inherit this limitation when copying human form factors. We introduce the visible-reachable workspace (VRW), a design-stage measure that conditions visibility on feasible reaching configurations and extends it to concurrent visibility of spatially separated work regions. We apply VRW by building a 31-DoF humanoid with independently actuated RGB-D cameras. On the same robot, camera articulation increases visible-reachable coverage from 38% to 97%. With actuated camera layouts, a second camera raises pairwise coverage from 0.45 to 0.95, while a third changes it only to 0.97. In a controlled two-target reach-and-grasp benchmark, our dual-actuated design reduces mean completion time by 17% and mechanical energy by 19% relative to the same robot with its cameras fixed. Hardware experiments demonstrate simultaneous observation and manipulation of front/back and left/right target pairs without torso reorientation. The results suggest that reachability becomes a more informative design quantity for perception-driven humanoid manipulation when it is evaluated together with the sensing configurations that make the reachable space observable. We will open-source all software and the humanoid hardware design. Our website is https://generalroboticslab.com/DukeHumanoidv2