Humanoid Robot RHP Friends: Seamless Combination of Autonomous and Teleoperated Tasks in a Nursing Context

This article describes RHP Friends, a social humanoid robot developed to enable assistive robotic deployments in human-coexisting environments. As a use case application, we present its potential use in nursing by extending its capabilities to operate devices and tools according to the task and by enabling remote assistance operations. To meet a wide variety of tasks and situations in environments designed by and for humans, we develop a system that seamlessly integrates the slim and lightweight robot and several technologies: locomanipulation, multicontact motion, teleoperation, and object detection and tracking. We demonstrate the system’s usage in a nursing application. The robot efficiently performs the daily task of patient transfer and a nonroutine task, represented by a request to operate a circuit breaker. This demonstration, held at the 2023 International Robot Exhibition (IREX), was conducted three times a day over three days.