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 whole-body 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.