Compliant Humanoids Moving Toward Rehabilitation Applications: Transparent Integration of Real-Time Control, Whole-Body Motion Generation, and Virtual Reality

Humanoids fascinate us through their anthropomorphic appearance, high dexterity, and potential to work in human-tailored environments and interact with humans in novel applications. In our research, we promote two real-world applications in physiotherapeutic juggling and assisted walking using two compliant humanoids (COMANs), COMAN and COMAN₊. We focus on rehabilitation, which, as a result of changing demographics, is becoming an increasingly crucial application field. However, as with most humanoid experiments, the realization of these scenarios is challenging because the hardware is brittle, the software is complex, and control remains highly demanding. In this article, we describe an integrative and transparent control architecture that alleviates this complexity by strictly adhering in design and implementation to a componentbased approach. It promotes flexibility and reusability and allows transparent switching among different humanoid robots, between simulation and the real world, and among control paradigms. It also orchestrates the integration of real-time (RT) and non-RT (NRT) components, including a virtual reality (VR) framework, toward rich user interaction.