From torque-controlled to intrinsically compliant humanoid robots

This paper gives an overview of the advancements in humanoid robotics at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) over the last 10 years. The development started with focus on dexterous, bimanual manipulation with the wheel-based humanoid Rollin’ Justin and continued with legged locomotion on TORO. With Rollin’ Justin, the team aims to create a cognitive robotic system that can reason about compliant manipulation tasks, based on intelligent decisions according to the actual state of the environment. These humanoids are expected to can perform a multitude of complex tasks and hereby contributing to human welfare. Possible fields of use include service robotics, industrial co-workers, search and rescue, space applications, medical robotics, etc. The experts suggest that teleoperated scenarios are feasible in short term, developing in long term towards shared or even full autonomy. Still, advancements must be made in almost all areas, starting from mechatronic robustness, reliability and energy efficiency, over multimodal perception and control up to autonomous planning and Artificial Intelligence-based reasoning. Development of interaction interfaces and communication modalities to humans will play an increasingly key role in the future.