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

Anastasia Bolotnikova (1, 2) , Pierre Gergondet (3) , Arnaud Tanguy (4) , Sébastien Courtois (2) , Abderrahmane Kheddar (4, 1, 3)

1 IDH - Interactive Digital Humans
2 SoftBank Robotics Europe
3 BIT - Beijing Institute of Technology
4 CNRS-AIST JRL - Joint Robotics Laboratory

We present an open-source software interface, called mc_naoqi, that allows to perform whole-body task-space Quadratic Programming based control, implemented in mc_rtc framework, on the SoftBank Robotics Europe humanoid robots. We describe the control interface, associated robot description packages, robot modules and sample whole-body controllers. We demonstrate the use of these tools in simulation for a robot interacting with a human model. Finally, we showcase and discuss the use of the developed open-source tools for running the human-robot close contact interaction experiments with real human subjects inspired from assistance scenarios.

Domaines: Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]; Robotique [cs.RO]; Systèmes et contrôle [cs.SY]

Anastasia Bolotnikova, Pierre Gergondet, Arnaud Tanguy, Sébastien Courtois, Abderrahmane Kheddar. Task-Space Control Interface for SoftBank Humanoid Robots and its Human-Robot Interaction Applications. SII 2021 - 13th IEEE/SICE International Symposium on System Integration, Jan 2021, Online conference (originally: Iwaki, Fukushima), Japan. pp.560-565, ⟨10.1109/IEEECONF49454.2021.9382685⟩. ⟨hal-02919367v3⟩