Integration of humanoid robots in collaborative working environment: a case study on motion generation

This paper illustrates through a practical example an integration of a humanoid robotic architecture, with an open-platform collaborative working environment called BSCW (Be Smart Cooperate Worldwide). BSCW is primarily designed to advocate a futuristic shared workspace system for humans. We exemplify how a complex robotic system (such as a humanoid robot) can be integrated as a proactive collaborative agent which provides services and interacts with other agents sharing the same collaborative environment workspace. Indeed, the robot is seen as a ‘user’ of the BSCW which is able to handle simple tasks and reports on their achievement status. We emphasis on the importance of using standard software such as CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) in order to easily build interfaces between several interacting complex software layers, namely from real-time constraints up to basic Internet data exchange.