Human-Assisted Humanoid Robot Control

Abstract

The control of humanoid robots has been extensively developed for their use in various environments possibly on difficult terrains. With such efforts, humanoid robots are now quite capable of operating in a very structured and well-known environment, especially on flat surface in indoor environment. However, the deployment of humanoid robots into real situations and applications is still limited because of the cases when there is still high risk of failures due to imperfect perception, planning, and control. To make up these limitations, a new control framework using human physical assistance may be developed. For example, robot can be assisted by human if there is very difficult terrain to traverse over. Then, the robot can move and navigate anywhere as necessary. As such, the use of the robot can be accelerated by overcoming difficult situations with the help of human assistance. In this paper, we would like to think about this kind of scenarios and what kind of control methods can be applied to develop this kind of capability.