  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 surface of
the upper-body of the iCub robot (with 2000 pressure-sensitive receptors). The
bio-inspired controller: (i) produces human-like minimum jerk movement
profiles; (ii) gives rise to a robot with whole-body visuo-tactile awareness,
resembling peripersonal space representations. The controller was extensively
experimentally validated, including a physical human-robot interaction
scenario.
