Abstract
Physical human–robot interaction is receiving a growing attention from the scientific community. One of the main challenges is to understand the principles governing the mutual behaviour during collaborative interactions between humans. In this context, the knowledge of human whole-body motion and forces plays a pivotal role. Current state of the art methods, however, do not allow one for reliable estimations of the human dynamics during physical human–robot interaction. This paper builds upon our former work on human dynamics estimation by proposing a probabilistic framework and an estimation tool for online monitoring of the human dynamics during human–robot collaboration tasks. The soundness of the proposed approach is verified in human–robot collaboration experiments and the results show that our probabilistic framework is able to estimate the human dynamic, thereby laying the foundation for more complex collaboration scenarios.
Highlights
IntroductionHuman–robot interaction, implies communication between two dyadic agents and, if the type of interaction is ‘physical’, the communication is represented by the set of forces mutually exchanged
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.B Claudia LatellaIn the last two decades, the scientific community has shown a great interest in understanding and shaping the interaction mechanisms between humans and robots
The paper endeavours to design an estimation tool for monitoring the real-time dynamics of a human being physically involved in a collaboration task with a robot
Summary
Human–robot interaction, implies communication between two dyadic agents and, if the type of interaction is ‘physical’, the communication is represented by the set of forces mutually exchanged Within this context, the step of quantifying these forces becomes of pivotal importance for understanding the interaction mechanisms. At the current scientific stage, classical robots are built to act for humans, but in order to adapt their functionality to the current technological demand, the new generation of robots are required to collaborate with humans. The humanoid robots formalism is adopted throughout the paper for modelling the human body as an articulated rigid multi-body system The advantage of this choice lies in the possibility to handle both the systems (i.e., human and robot) with the same mathematical tool. The application of the Euler–Poincaré formalism (Marsden and Ratiu 1999) leads to three sets of equations describing: (i) the motion of the human, (ii) the motion of the robot, (iii) the linking equations characterizing the contacts between the systems. (i )
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