An Interactive Hands-Free Controller for a Riding Ballbot to Enable Simple Shared Control Tasks
Chenzhang Xiao, Seung Yun Song, Yu Chen, Mahshid Mansouri, Joao Ramos,, William R. Norris, and Elizabeth T. Hsiao-Wecksler

TL;DR
This paper introduces an improved interactive hands-free control scheme for a riding ballbot, enhancing safety and control accuracy during shared tasks by personalizing control gains and compensating for interaction effects.
Contribution
The paper presents the development of an interactive hands-free admittance control scheme (iHACS) that improves speed tracking and safety in a riding ballbot during shared control tasks.
Findings
iHACS reduces translational motion and command speed RMSE.
iHACS allows higher maximum speeds under shared control.
Participants successfully used iHACS in various tasks.
Abstract
Our team developed a riding ballbot (called PURE) that is dynamically stable, omnidirectional, and driven by lean-to-steer control. A hands-free admittance control scheme (HACS) was previously integrated to allow riders with different torso functions to control the robot's movements via torso leaning and twisting. Such an interface requires motor coordination skills and could result in collisions with obstacles due to low proficiency. Hence, a shared controller (SC) that limits the speed of PURE could be helpful to ensure the safety of riders. However, the self-balancing dynamics of PURE could result in a weak control authority of its motion, in which the torso motion of the rider could easily result in poor tracking of the command speed dictated by the shared controller. Thus, we proposed an interactive hands-free admittance control scheme (iHACS), which added two modules to HACS to…
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Taxonomy
TopicsRobotic Path Planning Algorithms · Robotics and Automated Systems · Teleoperation and Haptic Systems
