Robotics is rapidly expanding into the human environment and vigorously engaged in its new emerging challenges. Interacting, exploring, and working with humans, the new generation of robots will increasingly touch people and their lives. The successful introduction of robots in human environments will rely on the development of competent and practical systems that are dependable, safe, and easy to use. This presentation focuses on our ongoing effort to develop human-friendly robotic systems that combine the essential characteristics of safety, human- compatibility, and performance. In human-friendly robot design, our effort has focused on new design concepts for the development of intrinsically safe robotic systems that possess the requisite capabilities and performance to interact and work with humans. The result is a novel hybrid actuation approach that combines the use of small motors at the joints with pneumatic, muscle-like actuators remotely connected by cables. With this hybrid actuation, the impedance of the resulting robot is decreased by an order of magnitude, making it substantially safer without sacrificing performance. To develop improved skills for human robot interaction, we pursued an extensive study of human motion to unveil its underlying characteristics, and to formulate general strategies for interactive whole-body robot control. Our exploration has employed models of human musculoskeletal dynamics and used experimental studies of human subjects with motion capture techniques. This investigation has revealed the dominant role physiological characteristics play in shaping human motion. Using these characteristics we develop generic motion behaviors that efficiently and effectively encode some basic human motion behaviors. The implementation of these behaviors on robots with complex human-like structures relied on a unified whole-body task-oriented control structure that addresses dynamics in the context of multiple tasks, multi-point contacts, and multiple constraints. The performance and effectiveness of this approach are demonstrated through extensive robot dynamic simulations and implementations on physical robots for experimental validation.