Enhancing Human-Robot Collaboration Transportation through Obstacle-Aware Vibrotactile Feedback

TL;DR

This paper introduces a vibrotactile feedback system that enhances human awareness of obstacles during collaborative transportation tasks, improving safety and effectiveness in environments with occlusions.

Contribution

It presents a novel haptic feedback module using vibrotactile belts and LIDAR sensors to improve obstacle awareness in human-robot collaboration.

Findings

Haptic feedback improves obstacle detection accuracy.

Operators successfully led transportation in unknown environments.

The system reduces collision risk during co-transportation.

Abstract

Transporting large and heavy objects can benefit from Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC), increasing the contribution of robots to our daily tasks and reducing the risk of injuries to the human operator. This approach usually posits the human collaborator as the leader, while the robot has the follower role. Hence, it is essential for the leader to be aware of the environmental situation. However, when transporting a large object, the operator's situational awareness can be compromised as the object may occlude different parts of the environment. This paper proposes a novel haptic-based environmental awareness module for a collaborative transportation framework that informs the human operator about surrounding obstacles. The robot uses two LIDARs to detect the obstacles in the surroundings. The warning module alerts the operator through a haptic belt with four vibrotactile devices that provide feedback about the location and proximity of the obstacles. By enhancing the operator's awareness of the surroundings, the proposed module improves the safety of the human-robot team in co-carrying scenarios by preventing collisions. Experiments with two non-expert subjects in two different situations are conducted. The results show that the human partner can successfully lead the co-transportation system in an unknown environment with hidden obstacles thanks to the haptic feedback.