Shared Autonomy Assisted by Impedance-Driven Anisotropic Guidance Field
For human-robot collaboration, this work addresses the overlooked issue of robot-to-human intent communication, providing an intuitive method that enhances mutual understanding and task efficiency.
The paper introduces Impedance-Driven Anisotropic Guidance Field Enhanced Shared Autonomy (IAGF-SA), a new paradigm that adds an embodied, physically-grounded communication channel to shared autonomy, improving task performance, human-robot agreement, and subjective experience across three scenarios and two teleoperation interfaces.
Shared autonomy (SA) enables robots to infer human intent and assist in its achievement. While most research focuses on improving intent inference, it overlooks whether humans can understand the robot's intent in return. Without such mutual understanding, collaboration becomes less effective, degrading user experience and task performance. To address this gap, previous studies have explicitly conveyed the robot intent through additional interfaces, which remain unintuitive and limited in expressiveness. Inspired by impedance control, we propose Impedance-Driven Anisotropic Guidance Field Enhanced Shared Autonomy (IAGF-SA), a novel paradigm that extends SA with an embodied, physically-grounded communication channel. This channel adaptively modulates the robot's dynamic response to human input, enabling intuitive, continuous, physically-grounded robot intent communication while naturally guiding human actions. User studies across three scenarios and two teleoperation interfaces indicate that IAGF-SA improves task performance, human-robot agreement, and subjective experience, thus demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing human-robot communication and collaboration.