# Trajectory Advancement during Human-Robot Collaboration

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a mathematical approach for trajectory advancement in human-robot collaboration, enabling robots to better exploit human assistance for task success, validated through experiments with the iCub robot.

## Contribution

It proposes a novel trajectory advancement method that leverages interaction wrench for improved human-robot collaboration, validated in simulation and real-world experiments.

## Key findings

- Effective trajectory advancement demonstrated with iCub robot
- Method successfully exploits human assistance during collaboration
- Validated in both simulation and real-world settings

## Abstract

As technology advances, the barriers between the co-existence of humans and robots are slowly coming down. The prominence of physical interactions for collaboration and cooperation between humans and robots will be an undeniable fact. Rather than exhibiting simple reactive behaviors to human interactions, it is desirable to endow robots with augmented capabilities of exploiting human interactions for successful task completion. Towards that goal, in this paper, we propose a trajectory advancement approach in which we mathematically derive the conditions that facilitate advancing along a reference trajectory by leveraging assistance from helpful interaction wrench present during human-robot collaboration. We validate our approach through experiments conducted with the iCub humanoid robot both in simulation and on the real robot.