Proposal of A Human Interface Technique for Reflecting The Operator's Intentionality in Human/Robot Collaborative Conveyance Tasks

Abstract

In the study, we deal with a human/robot coexistence system for their collaborative tasks of conveying works or tools in which the robot partially assists the human power. Special focus is on discussing the technical requirements for reflecting the operator's intentionality which includes both : on which pre-assigned path the operator intends to convey a work or a tool and how much of load pattern he/she desires to feel along the path, both in collaboration with the robot. First, after defining the problem of inferring the path intended by the operator as a pattern matching problem of isolating a path out of the preassigned ones with an incipient sequence of the detected trajectory data, we provide the system with a capability of inferring the operator-intended path pattern so that the robot can trace one of the preassigned patterns. Second, we propose a "Field Impedance Equalizer (FIE)" with which the operator is able to determine location-dependent mechanical impedance of the human/robot system and generate the desired motion patterns through verbal communication from the oprator to the robot. Experimental results show that, with the aid of the proposed human interface, the human/robot cooperative motion generated the desired force pattern to merge so as to comply with the velocity pattern which was verified to have only a small deviation throughout the trial even from the beginning.