Shared Autonomy Assisted by Impedance-Driven Anisotropic Guidance Field

TL;DR

This paper introduces IAGF-SA, a novel shared autonomy framework that uses impedance-driven guidance to facilitate intuitive, physically-grounded communication of robot intent, improving collaboration and user experience.

Contribution

It proposes a new physically-grounded communication channel for shared autonomy, extending intent sharing beyond traditional interfaces with an impedance-driven guidance field.

Findings

IAGF-SA improves task performance in user studies.

It enhances human-robot agreement and subjective experience.

The approach effectively communicates robot intent through physical interaction.

Abstract

Shared autonomy (SA) enables robots to infer human intent and assist in its achievement. While most research focuses on improving intent inference, it overlooks whether humans can understand the robot's intent in return. Without such mutual understanding, collaboration becomes less effective, degrading user experience and task performance. To address this gap, previous studies have explicitly conveyed the robot intent through additional interfaces, which remain unintuitive and limited in expressiveness. Inspired by impedance control, we propose Impedance-Driven Anisotropic Guidance Field Enhanced Shared Autonomy (IAGF-SA), a novel paradigm that extends SA with an embodied, physically-grounded communication channel. This channel adaptively modulates the robot's dynamic response to human input, enabling intuitive, continuous, physically-grounded robot intent communication while naturally guiding human actions. User studies across three scenarios and two teleoperation interfaces indicate that IAGF-SA improves task performance, human-robot agreement, and subjective experience, thus demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing human-robot communication and collaboration.