HARMONIOUS—Human-Like Reactive Motion Control and Multimodal Perception for Humanoid Robots

For safe and effective operation of humanoid robots in human-populated environments, the problem of commanding a large number of degrees of freedom (DoFs) while simultaneously considering dynamic obstacles and human proximity has still not been solved. In this article, we present a new reactive motion controller that commands two arms of a humanoid robot and three torso joints (17 DoF in total). We formulate a quadratic program that seeks joint velocity commands respecting multiple constraints while minimizing the magnitude of the velocities. We introduce a new unified treatment of obstacles that dynamically maps visual and proximity (precollision) and tactile (postcollision) obstacles as additional constraints to the motion controller, in a distributed fashion over the surface of the upper body of the iCub robot (with 2000 pressure-sensitive receptors). This results in a bioinspired controller that: first, gives rise to a robot with whole-body visuo-tactile awareness, resembling peripersonal space representations, and, second, produces human-like minimum jerk movement profiles. The controller was extensively experimentally validated, including a physical human–robot interaction scenario.