Multi-Contact Planning on Humans for Physical Assistance by Humanoid

Anastasia Bolotnikova (1, 2) , Sébastien Courtois (1) , Abderrahmane Kheddar (2, 3)

1 SoftBank Robotics Europe
2 IDH - Interactive Digital Humans
3 CNRS-AIST JRL - Joint Robotics Laboratory

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 wholebody 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 letter with examples of posture generation for physical human-robot interaction scenarios.

Mots clés: Human-robot interaction; Physically Assistive Devices; Humanoid Robots; Robot Companions; Physical Human-Robot Interaction

Domaines: Robotique [cs.RO]; Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]

Anastasia Bolotnikova, Sébastien Courtois, Abderrahmane Kheddar. Multi-Contact Planning on Humans for Physical Assistance by Humanoid. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2020, 5 (1), pp.135-142. ⟨10.1109/LRA.2019.2947907⟩. ⟨hal-02160461v6⟩