Interaction Task Motion Learning for Human–Robot Interaction Control

Abstract

Traditional applications of robot manipulators are mainly limited to tracking control tasks, in which the desired objectives are specified as desired positions or trajectories. In such applications, a convenient and easy way of programming robots is the traditional teach-and-playback method. However, advances in sensing and robotic technologies have led to the requirements of more demanding tasks, in which robots may need to interact with a human or follow the human’s instructions in performing a sequence of more complex tasks. In such applications, it is not sufficient to just learn the positions or motion and play it back using a robot controller. In this article, a task learning approach is proposed for human–robot interaction systems, where a set of interaction behaviors is formulated and solved by specifying the task requirements in terms of potential energy. The motion behaviors demonstrated by humans can thus be acquired by the robot by seeking the appropriate task parameters of the dynamic potential energy function. To play back and combine the tasks in a sequential way by using a single controller, a new robot controller is also proposed. Lyapunov-like analysis is adopted to guarantee the stability of the control system, and experimental results are given to validate the performance of the proposed learning and control strategies.