Towards Partner-Aware Humanoid Robot Control Under Physical Interactions
This work addresses the challenge of improving robot control during physical interactions with humans or other robots, which is incremental as it builds on existing interaction studies.
The paper tackled the problem of physical human-robot interaction by proposing a coupled-dynamics formalism and partner-aware control techniques to exploit human help for task completion, validated through experiments with two iCub robots.
The topic of physical human-robot interaction received a lot of attention from the robotics community because of many promising application domains. However, studying physical interaction between a robot and an external agent, like a human or another robot, without considering the dynamics of both the systems may lead to many short-comings in fully exploiting the interaction. In this paper, we present a coupled-dynamics formalism followed by a sound approach in exploiting helpful interaction with a humanoid robot. In particular, we propose the first attempt to define and exploit the human help for the robot to accomplish a specific task. As a result, we present a task-based partner-aware robot control techniques. The theoretical results are validated by conducting experiments with two iCub humanoid robots involved in physical interaction.