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

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.