Reactive Walking Based on Upper-Body Manipulability: An application to Intention Detection and Reaction

Abstract

In this paper, we look at the challenge of human robot interaction in locomotion. We consider a hand-in-hand interaction scenario where a human compliantly interacts with the upper-body of an impedance controlled humanoid. By exploring the velocity transmission of the robot arms, and the interaction in terms of robot arms manipulation quality evaluated through the monitoring of their manipulability the proposed method derives suitable reactive steps in appropriate directions to ensure that the robot manipulation ability is maintained with the robot arms providing high capacity of motion along the different directions. The proposed approach can be combined with different walking pattern generators and is not tailored to a specific one used in this work. The results of the proposed method are experimentally validated on the COMAN + humanoid robot showing the efficacy of the method to generate reactive stepping driven by the interaction and manipulation motion of the human operator. Besides, the work also provides a real-time software architecture to control humanoid COMAN+, but it is also flexible to be used for the control of other robot platforms.