Autonomous Initiation of Human Physical Assistance by a Humanoid

Abstract

We study the use of humanoid robot technology for physical assistance in motion for a frail person. A careful design of a whole-body controller for a humanoid robot needs to be developed in order to ensure efficient, intuitive and secure interaction between humanoid-assistant and human-patient.Here, we present a design and implementation of a wholebody controller that enables a humanoid robot with a mobile base to autonomously reach a person, perform audiovisual communication of intent, and establish several physical contacts for initiating physical assistance. Our controller uses (i) visual human perception as a feedback for navigation and (ii) joint residual signal based contact detection for closed-loop physical contact creation. We assess the developed controller on a healthy subject and report on the experiments achieved and the results.

Task-Space Control Interface for SoftBank Humanoid Robots and its Human-Robot Interaction Applications

“…In our recent publication, we have already demonstrated how the developed tools, presented in the current work, can be used to enable Pepper robot to perform autonomous initiation of human physical assistance [6]. We also made the controller code 12 publicly available to serve as a software reference to our work and as an advanced FSM mc rtc HRI controller example.…”

“…The aim here is also to demonstrate how the controllers for new HRI scenarios can be easily prepared using our developed tools and re-using states and elements of the controllers written for other HRI scenarios. As such, for instance, the navigation toward a human state could be reused from our previous work in [6], for this new scenario with almost no modifications, despite the person lying in the bed instead of sitting on a chair. Other parts of this new controller FSM also needed only slight adjustments w.r.t our existing work (states present in the other HRI controller) to create a controller for this new HRI application.…”

“…This framework provides developers with useful tools for writing complex controllers for either individual or multiple interacting robots to perform wide variety of experiments, e.g. in aircraft automation [4] or in physically interacting with humans [5], [6] that we technically explain and extend in this work.…”

Human-Humanoid Interaction and Cooperation: a Review

“…Even though they do not possess legs, humans perceive them differently from robotic manipulators [59], which could have a beneficial impact depending on the application. In a recent work, Bolotnikova et al presented a humanfriendly humanoid that is able to approach a person in need and establish multimodal interactions for human assistance, including initiating physical contact [94]. Even though there was no shared task in [94], it gives a prime example of how leveraging the human perception could be used for assistance in the future.…”

Adaptive Task-Space Force Control for Humanoid-to-Human Assistance

“…Maybe simpler robots specifically designed for a given task is a better solution [29], [30]? Nevertheless, the use of the humanoid technology allows developers to provide a more user-friendly pHRI experience through the use of additional Pepper humanoid features, such as verbal, visual and body language communication [31]. Besides providing physical assistance, a more interactive robot with a humanoid form can do more domestic tasks and provide encouragement via communication channels familiar to the human users [32], [33].…”