Towards Partner-Aware Humanoid Robot Control Under Physical Interactions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel coupled-dynamics framework for humanoid robot control that explicitly considers human help during physical interactions, validated through experiments with iCub robots.

Contribution

It presents the first formalism to define and utilize human assistance in robot control during physical interactions, enhancing task performance.

Findings

Effective exploitation of human help improves robot task success.

Coupled-dynamics approach outperforms traditional methods in physical interactions.

Experimental validation confirms the approach's practical viability.

Abstract

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.