HARMONIOUS -- Human-like reactive motion control and multimodal perception for humanoid robots

Abstract

For safe and effective operation of humanoid robots in human-populated environments, the problem of commanding a large number of Degrees of Freedom (DoF) while simultaneously considering dynamic obstacles and human proximity has still not been solved. We present a new reactive motion controller that commands two arms of a humanoid robot and three torso joints (17 DoF in total). We formulate a quadratic program that seeks joint velocity commands respecting multiple constraints while minimizing the magnitude of the velocities. We introduce a new unified treatment of obstacles that dynamically maps visual and proximity (pre-collision) and tactile (post-collision) obstacles as additional constraints to the motion controller, in a distributed fashion over the surface of the upper body of the iCub robot (with 2000 pressure-sensitive receptors). This results in a bio-inspired controller that: (i) gives rise to a robot with whole-body visuo-tactile awareness, resembling peripersonal space representations, and (ii) produces human-like minimum jerk movement profiles. The controller was extensively experimentally validated, including a physical human-robot interaction scenario.