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

TL;DR

This paper introduces an open-source control interface for SoftBank humanoid robots enabling whole-body task-space control, demonstrated through simulations and human interaction experiments, advancing human-robot collaboration capabilities.

Contribution

The paper presents mc_naoqi, an open-source software interface for task-space control on SoftBank humanoid robots, including control algorithms, robot descriptions, and application examples.

Findings

Successful simulation of human-robot interaction scenarios.

Implementation of control algorithms in mc_rtc framework.

Feasibility of close contact human-robot experiments.

Abstract

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.