Dexterous hand-arm coordinated manipulation using active body-environment contact

Human-symbiotic humanoid robots that can perform tasks dexterously using their hands are needed in our homes, welfare facilities, and other places. To improve their task performance, we propose a motion control scheme aimed at appropriately coordinated hand and arm motions. By observing human manual tasks, we identified active body-environment contact as a kind of human manual skill and devised a motion control scheme based on it. We also analyzed the effectiveness of active body-environment contact in glass-placing and drawer-opening tasks. We validated our motion control scheme through actual tests on a prototype human-symbiotic humanoid robot.