Multi-Contact Planning on Humans for Physical Assistance by Humanoid

Abstract

For robots to interact with humans in close proximity safely and efficiently, a specialized method to compute whole-body robot posture and plan contact locations is required. In our work, a humanoid robot is used as a caregiver that is performing a physical assistance task. We propose a method for formulating and initializing a non-linear optimization posture generation problem from an intuitive description of the assistance task and the result of a human point cloud processing. The proposed method allows to plan whole-body posture and contact locations on a task-specific surface of a human body, under robot equilibrium, friction cone, torque/joint limits, collision avoidance, and assistance task inherent constraints. The proposed framework can uniformly handle any arbitrary surface generated from point clouds, for autonomously planing the contact locations and interaction forces on potentially moving, movable, and deformable surfaces, which occur in direct physical human-robot interaction. We conclude the paper with examples of posture generation for physical human-robot interaction scenarios.

Soft robotic shell with active thermal display

“…The system is thought to provide a complete solution to physical interaction for assistive purposes (see Figure S1 in “Supplementary material”). The study in 53 also highlights use-cases of a humanoid-human assistance considering physical multi-contact with the robotic parts such as the upper arm and interactions that can occur on whole-body.…”

Robotics in Clinical and Developmental Psychology

“…The most used humanoid robots nowadays are Pepper and NAO, whose advanced sensor-systems and human-like physical features and behaviors enable them to assist patients by interacting with them in close proximity, safely and efficiently (e.g., Bolotnikova et al., 2019 ). Independent of whether therapeutic or rehabilitation, digital or embodied, implementation of anthropomorphic systems revolves around the replication of human-like mental and behavioral features: from coordination of eye gaze, look direction and pointing, to head nods, and verbal and non-verbal emotional expressions.…”

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

“…A set of contact constraints between two models is defined. The contact point locations are planned w.r.t to the assistance task as in [3].…”

“…D AILY assistance for frail persons and elderly is one of the promising application areas of humanoid robots, e.g. [1], [2], [3]. Humanoids could be specifically designed to be userfriendly, multi-functional and safe [4].…”