There has been an increasing interest in mobile manipulators that are capable of performing physical work in living spaces worldwide, corresponding to an aging population with declining birth rates with the expectation of improving quality of life (QoL). We assume that overall research and development will accelerate by using a common robot platform among a lot of researchers since that enables them to share their research results. Therefore we have developed a compact and safe research platform, Human Support Robot (HSR), which can be operated in an actual home environment and we have provided it to various research institutes to establish the developers community. Currently, the number of HSR users is expanding to 44 sites in 12 countries worldwide (as of November 30th, 2018). To activate the community, we assume that the robot competition will be effective. As a result of international public offering, HSR has been adopted as a standard platform for international robot competitions such as RoboCup@Home and World Robot Summit (WRS). HSR is provided to participants of those competitions. In this paper, we describe HSR's development background since 2006, and technical detail of hardware design and software architecture. Specifically, we describe its omnidirectional mobile base using the dual-wheel caster-drive mechanism, which is the basis of HSR's operational movement and a novel whole body motion control system. Finally, we describe the verification of autonomous task capability and the results of utilization in RoboCup@Home in order to demonstrate the effect of introducing the platform.

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We developed a robotic arm for a master-slave system to support "mutual telexistence," which realizes remote dexterous manipulation tasks and close physical communication with other people using gestures. In this paper, we describe the specifications of the experimental setup of the master-slave arm to demonstrate the feasibility of the mutual telexistence concept. We developed the master arm of a telexistence robot for interpersonal communication. The last degree of the 7-degree-of-freedom slave arm is resolved by placing a small orientation sensor on the operators arm. This master arm is made light and impedance control is applied in order to grant the operator as much freedom of movement as possible. For this development stage, we compared three control methods and confirmed that the impedance control method is the most appropriate to this system.

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