# HARMONIOUS -- Human-like reactive motion control and multimodal perception for humanoid robots

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.02711 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02711/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Dec 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [UniConFlow: A Unified Constrained Flow-Matching Framework for Certified Motion Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02955/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

For safe and effective operation of humanoid robots in human-populated environments, the problem of commanding a large number of Degrees of Freedom (DoF) while simultaneously considering dynamic obstacles and human proximity has still not been solved. We present a new reactive motion controller that commands two arms of a humanoid robot and three torso joints (17 DoF in total). We formulate a quadratic program that seeks joint velocity commands respecting multiple constraints while minimizing the magnitude of the velocities. We introduce a new unified treatment of obstacles that dynamically maps visual and proximity (pre-collision) and tactile (post-collision) obstacles as additional constraints to the motion controller, in a distributed fashion over the surface of the upper body of the iCub robot (with 2000 pressure-sensitive receptors). This results in a bio-inspired controller that: (i) gives rise to a robot with whole-body visuo-tactile awareness, resembling peripersonal space representations, and (ii) produces human-like minimum jerk movement profiles. The controller was extensively experimentally validated, including a physical human-robot interaction scenario.