Human-centered Control of a Growing Soft Robot for Object Manipulation
This work addresses human-robot interaction for soft robots in manipulation tasks, but it is incremental as it focuses on initial teleoperation with plans for future shared autonomy.
The authors developed a user-friendly teleoperation system for a soft robot manipulator that grows via tip eversion, enabling an operator to build a tower of blocks in a complex environment.
We present a user-friendly interface to teleoperate a soft robot manipulator in a complex environment. Key components of the system include a manipulator with a grasping end-effector that grows via tip eversion, gesture-based control, and haptic display to the operator for feedback and guidance. In the initial work, the operator uses the soft robot to build a tower of blocks, and future works will extend this to shared autonomy scenarios in which the human operator and robot intelligence are both necessary for task completion.