Dancing with REEM-C: A robot-to-human physical-social communication study

TL;DR

This study explores how a humanoid robot can effectively communicate with humans through physical-social cues during a dance, aiming to improve human-robot collaboration by integrating multiple communication modalities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel split whole-body control framework for a humanoid robot to facilitate intuitive and comfortable physical-social communication in a dance scenario.

Findings

Haptic signals were most effective for communication clarity.

Participants reported higher comfort levels with visual cues.

The control framework successfully enabled smooth leader-follower interactions.

Abstract

Humans often work closely together and relay a wealth of information through physical interaction. Robots, on the other hand, are not yet able to work similarly closely with humans and to effectively convey information when engaging in physical-social human-robot interaction (psHRI). This currently limits the potential of human-robot collaboration to solve real-world problems. This paper investigates how to establish clear and intuitive robot-to-human communication, while considering human comfort during psHRI. We approach this question from the perspective of a leader-follower dancing scenario, in which a full-body humanoid robot leads a human by signaling the next steps through a choice of communication modalities including haptic, visual, and audio signals. This is achieved through the development of a split whole-body control framework combining admittance and impedance control on the upper body, with position control on the lower body for balancing and stepping. Robot-led psHRI participant experiments allowed us to verify controller performance, as well as to build an understanding of what types of communication work better from the perspective of human partners, particularly in terms of perceived effectiveness and comfort.