SUPER-MAN: SUPERnumerary Robotic Bodies for Physical Assistance in HuMAN-Robot Conjoined Actions
This addresses the problem of enhancing physical assistance in industrial tasks for human operators, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing robotic and interaction concepts.
The paper tackles physical assistance in human-robot conjoined actions by developing the SUPER-MAN framework with two mobile supernumerary robotic systems, MOCA-MAN and Kairos-MAN, and presents quantitative performance results from a user study with multiple subjects, including effort-demanding and dexterous tasks, along with qualitative feedback from NASA-TLX questionnaires.
This paper presents a mobile supernumerary robotic approach to physical assistance in human-robot conjoined actions. The study starts with a description of the SUPER-MAN concept. The idea is to develop and utilize mobile collaborative systems that can follow human loco-manipulation commands to perform industrial tasks through three main components: i) an admittance-type interface, ii) a human-robot interaction controller, and iii) a supernumerary robotic body. Next, we present two possible implementations within the framework from theoretical and hardware perspectives. The first system is called MOCA-MAN and comprises a redundant torque-controlled robotic arm and an omnidirectional mobile platform. The second one is called Kairos-MAN, formed by a high-payload 6-DoF velocity-controlled robotic arm and an omnidirectional mobile platform. The systems share the same admittance interface, through which user wrenches are translated to loco-manipulation commands generated by whole-body controllers of each system. Besides, a thorough user study with multiple and cross-gender subjects is presented to reveal the quantitative performance of the two systems in effort-demanding and dexterous tasks. Moreover, we provide qualitative results from the NASA-TLX questionnaire to demonstrate the SUPER-MAN approach's potential and its acceptability from the users' viewpoint.