Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has recently received considerable attention in the academic community, in labs, in technology companies, and through the media. Because of this attention, it is desirable to present a survey of HRI to serve as a tutorial to people outside the field and to promote discussion of a unified vision of HRI within the field. The goal of this review is to present a unified treatment of HRI-related problems, to identify key themes, and discuss challenge problems that are likely to shape the field in the near future. Although the review follows a survey structure, the goal of presenting a coherent "story" of HRI means that there are necessarily some well-written, intriguing, and influential papers that are not referenced. Instead of trying to survey every paper, we describe the HRI story from multiple perspectives with an eye toward identifying themes that cross applications. The survey attempts to include papers that represent a fair cross section of the universities, government efforts, industry labs, and countries that contribute to HRI, and a cross section of the disciplines that contribute to the field, such as human, factors, robotics, cognitive psychology, and design.

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Human-Robot Interaction: A Survey

http://www.centropiaggio.unipi.it/sites/default/files/softarm-MMT.pdf

An atlas of physical human-robot interaction

Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems 参加報告

While brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) can provide communication to people who are locked-in, they suffer from a very low information transfer rate. Further, using a BCI requires a concentration effort and using it continuously can be tiring. The brain controlled wheelchair (BCW) described in this paper aims at providing mobility to BCI users despite these limitations, in a safe and efficient way. Using a slow but reliable P300 based BCI, the user selects a destination amongst a list of predefined locations. While the wheelchair moves on virtual guiding paths ensuring smooth, safe, and predictable trajectories, the user can stop the wheelchair by using a faster BCI. Experiments with nondisabled subjects demonstrated the efficiency of this strategy. Brain control was not affected when the wheelchair was in motion, and the BCW enabled the users to move to various locations in less time and with significantly less control effort than other control strategies proposed in the literature.

/pdf/a-brain-controlled-wheelchair-to-navigate-in-familiar-5cre1p8c4w.pdf

A Brain Controlled Wheelchair to Navigate in Familiar Environments

This paper presents a novel human-like learning controller to interact with unknown environments. Strictly derived from the minimization of instability, motion error, and effort, the controller compensates for the disturbance in the environment in interaction tasks by adapting feedforward force and impedance. In contrast with conventional learning controllers, the new controller can deal with unstable situations that are typical of tool use and gradually acquire a desired stability margin. Simulations show that this controller is a good model of human motor adaptation. Robotic implementations further demonstrate its capabilities to optimally adapt interaction with dynamic environments and humans in joint torque controlled robots and variable impedance actuators, without requiring interaction force sensing.

/pdf/human-like-adaptation-of-force-and-impedance-in-stable-and-y1ax3vk89m.pdf

Human-Like Adaptation of Force and Impedance in Stable and Unstable Interactions

We describe a new robot architecture: the collaborative robot, or cobot. Cobots are intended for direct physical interaction with a human operator. The cobot can create smooth, strong virtual surfaces and other haptic effects within a shared human/cobot workspace. The kinematic properties of cobots differ markedly from those of robots. Most significantly, cobots have only one mechanical degree of freedom, regardless of their taskspace dimensionality. The instantaneous direction of motion associated with this single degree of freedom is actively servo-controlled, or steered, within the higher dimensional taskspace. This paper explains the kinematics of cobots and the continuously variable transmissions (CVT) that are essential to them. Powered cobots are introduced, made possible by a parallel interconnection of the CVT. We discuss the relation of cobots to conventionally actuated robots and to nonholonomic robots. Several cobots in design, prototype, or industrial testbed settings illustrate the concepts discussed.

Cobot architecture

A general framework is presented for the design and analysis of cobot controllers. Cobots are inherently passive robots intended for direct collaborative work with a human operator. While a human applies forces and moments, the controller guides motion by tuning the cobot's set of continuously variable transmissions. In this paper, a path following controller is developed that steers the cobot so as to asymptotically approach and follow a pre-planned path. The controller is based on feedback linearization. Generality across cobot architectures is assured by designing the controller in task space and developing transformations between each of four spaces: task space, joint space, a set of coupling spaces, and steering space.

/pdf/a-general-framework-for-cobot-control-u40ax2nqf7.pdf

A general framework for cobot control

Cobots are a class of mechanically passive robotic devices, intended for direct physical collaboration with a human operator. The operator supplies all motive power while the cobot enforces software-defined guiding surfaces, or constraints. Cobots are intrinsically passive, safe devices. This is because, rather than employ powered actuators to produce constraint forces, cobots use "steerable" nonholonomic joints. Constraint forces are mechanical in origin, yet software defined. The simplest possible cobot is a unicycle which is steered by a servo system acting under computer control, but which is moved by a human operator. The unicycle cobot requires essentially no consideration of kinematics. Two fundamental control modes of the unicycle cobot, "virtual caster" and "constraint tracking", are reviewed. More complicated cobots, such as the three-wheeled "Scooter", require a set of kinematic tranformations relating configuration space to joint space. These transformations play a role in cobot control like that of the Jacobian in robot control.

R.B. Gillespie

Papers

Cobot architecture

A general framework for cobot control

Cobot control