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An important component for the effective collaboration of humans with robots is the compatibility of their movements, especially when humans physically collaborate with a robot partner. Following previous findings that humans interact more seamlessly with a robot that moves with humanlike or biological velocity profiles, this study examined whether humans can adapt to a robot that violates human signatures. The specific focus was on the role of extensive practice and realtime augmented feedback. Six groups of participants physically tracked a robot tracing an ellipse with profiles where velocity scaled with the curvature of the path in biological and nonbiological ways, while instructed to minimize the interaction force with the robot. Three of the 6 groups received real-time visual feedback about their force error. Results showed that with 3 daily practice sessions, when given feedback about their force errors, humans could decrease their interaction forces when the robot’s trajectory violated human-like velocity patterns. Conversely, when augmented feedback was not provided, there were no improvements despite this extensive practice. The biological profile showed no improvements, even with feedback, indicating that the (non-zero) force had already reached a floor level. These findings highlight the importance of biological robot trajectories and augmented feedback to guide humans to adapt to non-biological movements in physical human-robot interaction. These results have implications on various fields of robotics, such as surgical applications and collaborative robots for industry.
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Velocity-Curvature Patterns Limit Human-Robot Physical Interaction
Physical human–robot collaboration is becoming more common, both in industrial and service robotics. Cooperative execution of a task requires intuitive and efficient interaction between both actors. For humans, this means being able to predict and adapt to robot movements. Given that natural human movement exhibits several robust features, we examined whether human–robot physical interaction is facilitated when these features are considered in robot control. The present study investigated how humans adapt to biological and nonbiological velocity patterns in robot movements. Participants held the end-effector of a robot that traced an elliptic path with either biological (twothirds power law) or nonbiological velocity profiles. Participants were instructed to minimize the force applied on the robot endeffector. Results showed that the applied force was significantly lower when the robot moved with a biological velocity pattern. With extensive practice and enhanced feedback, participants were able to decrease their force when following a nonbiological velocity pattern, but never reached forces below those obtained with the 2/3 power law profile. These results suggest that some robust features observed in natural human movements are also a strong preference in guided movements. Therefore, such features should be considered in human–robot physical collaboration.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1637854
- PAR ID:
- 10082099
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE robotics & automation letters
- Volume:
- 3
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2377-3766
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 249-256
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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