Balance control of robot and human-robot interaction with haptic sensing foots

This paper presents a haptic sensor foot system for humanoid robot and an active tactile sensing technique to balance the humanoid robot with two legs for human and robot interaction task. The proposed sensors are implemented on two robotic foots. The sensor unit contains three thin sheets of force sensitive resistors. Those elements are arranged triangularly on the back of each foot. The research objective is to produce an artifact, which can be operated in a natural and intuitive manner by utilizing the haptic information to control a robot motion to keep the balance on the different contacted ground slopes with their both legs. As a possible application, we also attempted to let the robot avoid the falling down due to the external force by the unpredicted pushing action apply to the robot during human-robot interaction. In these applications, the information about the contacted ground floor or robot orientation is not required in advance.