Task-Space Control Interface for SoftBank Humanoid Robots and its Human-Robot Interaction Applications
This provides a practical tool for researchers working with SoftBank robots in human-robot interaction applications, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing control frameworks.
The authors developed an open-source software interface (mc_naoqi) for whole-body task-space control on SoftBank humanoid robots, enabling human-robot close contact interaction experiments in both simulation and real-world assistance scenarios.
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.