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Abstract Understanding the human motor control strategy during physical interaction tasks is crucial for developing future robots for physical human–robot interaction (pHRI). In physical human–human interaction (pHHI), small interaction forces are known to convey their intent between the partners for effective motor communication. The aim of this work is to investigate what affects the human’s sensitivity to the externally applied interaction forces. The hypothesis is that one way the small interaction forces are sensed is through the movement of the arm and the resulting proprioceptive signals. A pHRI setup was used to provide small interaction forces to the hand of seated participants in one of four directions, while the participants were asked to identify the direction of the push while blindfolded. The result shows that participants’ ability to correctly report the direction of the interaction force was lower with low interaction force as well as with high muscle contraction. The sensitivity to the interaction force direction increased with the radial displacement of the participant’s hand from the initial position: the further they moved the more correct their responses were. It was also observed that the estimated stiffness of the arm varies with the level of muscle contraction and robot interaction force. 

Effective physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) depends on how humans can communicate their intentions for movement with others. While it is speculated that small interaction forces contain significant information to convey the specific movement intention of physical humanhuman interaction (pHHI), the underlying mechanism for humans to infer intention from such small forces is largely unknown. The hypothesis in this work is that the sensitivity to a small interaction force applied at the hand is affected by the movement of the arm that is affected by the arm stiffness. For this, a haptic robot was used to provide the endpoint interaction forces to the arm of seated human participants. They were asked to determine one of the four directions of the applied robot interaction force without visual feedback. Variations of levels of interaction force as well as arm muscle contraction were applied. The results imply that human’s ability to identify and respond to the correct direction of small interaction forces was lower when the alignment of human arm movement with respect to the force direction was higher. In addition, the sensitivity to the direction of the small interaction force was high when the arm stiffness was low. It is also speculated that humans lower their arm stiffness to be more sensitive to smaller interaction forces. These results will help develop human-like pHRI systems for various applications. 

We present a new design method that is tailored for designing a physical interactive robotic arm for overground physical interaction. Designing such robotic arms present various unique requirements that differ from existing robotic arms, which are used for general manipulation, such as being able to generate required forces at every point inside the workspace and/or having low intrinsic mechanical impedance. Our design method identifies these requirements and categorizes them into kinematic and dynamic characteristics of the robot and then ensures that these unique considerations are satisfied in the early design phase. The robot’s capability for use in such tasks is analyzed using mathematical simulations of the designed robot, and discussion of its dynamic characteristics is presented. With our proposed method, the robot arm is ensured to perform various overground interactive tasks with a human.