Cooperative Motion Generation Method for Human-robot Cooperationto deal with Environmental/Task Constraints

Abstract

We propose a cooperative motion generation method based on the haptic interaction between robots and human beings for the cooperation of robots with human beings. There are lot of problems in the human-robot haptic interaction, such as self-collisions, collisions with obstacles, and limitation of the range of joint movements. We had proposed the self-collision avoidance motion generation method for robot cooperation with human beings in our previous study. In this study, we focus on the range of joint movements of robots in order to deal with the environmental/task constraints and also to prevent self-collisions. By considering the range of joint movements, the robot could also avoid the limitation of the range of the joint movement, as well as self-collisions. Additionally, by appropriately setting the range of movements of the mobile base of robots, we can generate the cooperative motion in robots, which may assist in dealing with the environmental/task constraints. The proposed method is employed in a human-friendly robot referred to as “MR Helper,” and some experiments are carried out for validating the method.