Compliant interaction in household environments by the Armar-III humanoid robot

In this work, we present a humanoid robot able to perform compliant physical interaction tasks with furniture commonly found in household environments. A general framework for task description and sensor-based execution, based on previous work, has been adopted for this purpose, providing versatility to the robot, which is able to adapt its task knowledge to several different cases, without being specifically programmed for a particular task. Robustness to uncertainties during task execution is guaranteed by a force-torque sensor placed in the robotpsilas wrist, which is in charge of adapting the robot motion to the particular task. A total of 8 degrees of freedom are controlled, making the task execution highly redundant, thus allowing the use of auxiliary secondary tasks by means of task and joint redundancy management. Several experiments, performed in a real kitchen environment, are shown.