Behavior integration for whole-body close interactions by a humanoid with soft sensor flesh

In order for humanoids to be able to have close interactions with humans or environments using whole body contacts, development of humanoids with soft sensor flesh is one of the key issues. Therefore we have been developed dasiamacrapsila, a humanoid with soft sensor flesh, and it can sense distributed 3D force directions during interaction behavior with humans or environments. However, development of such hardware system itself is not enough. For utilizing the hardware ability more effectively, design of interaction behavior using rich sensor information including tactile sensors is indispensable. Clearly, the analytical design for the specific task is getting harder for such humanoids. This is because those kinds of humanoids are expected to have many contact points with outer environments during their interaction behavior. Also, many locally occurred events, which humanoids have to response, are detected by the distributed sensors. In order to deal with such complex circumstances, behavior integration system is introduced in the interaction behavior of the humanoids with soft sensor flesh. By introducing such behavior integration system, adaptability to many local events can be added incrementally. Also the analytically designed and slightly limited behaviors can be accumulated for generating next richer behavior during the close interactions with humans or outer environments. As such behavior integration system, dasiaParallel Evaluating Monitorspsila are introduced and applied to the macra´s interaction behaviors with humans and environments in this paper.