A human-inspired object handover controller

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel controller for safe, efficient, and intuitive robot-to-human object handovers and a set of experiments to evaluate user responses to the robot's handover behavior. The controller enables a robot to mimic human behavior by actively regulating the applied grip force according to the measured load force during a handover. We provide an implementation of the controller on a Willow Garage PR2 robot, demonstrating the feasibility of realizing our design on robots with basic sensor/actuator capabilities. A user study comparing four variations of our controller shows that our design yields both human-like and human-preferred object handovers.

Developing Robot Assistants with Communicative Cues for Safe, Fluent HRI

“…14.3. An example of a non-explicit cue would be when a person inadvertently looks towards the location where they intend to hand an object over to someone else [1,17,23]; or the sensation of feeling another person managing the weight of an object that is handed over, allowing it to be released [3,4].…”

“…This is an example of an interaction that is mostly mediated by naturalistic, non-explicit cues. Important cues occurring during handovers that have been explored by CARIS include the forces acting on the object being handed over [3,4], gaze behaviors during the handover interaction [17], motion trajectories [9,10], and kinematic configurations [2].…”

“…This has direct implications for the design of a controller for robot-to-human handovers. Chan et al [4] implemented such a controller on the Willow Garage PR2 robot, which mimics human behavior by regulating grip forces acting on the transferred object.…”

“…The CARIS Laboratory has invested significant effort in the development of natural, fluent human-robot handovers [2-4, 9, 10, 17]. Handover behaviors include not only visual cues [1,2,9,10,17,23], but also important force and haptic cues [3,4]. Other physical interaction studies, which have been carried out in conjunction with the Sensory Perception & INteraction (SPIN) Laboratory at UBC, include interactions in which participants tap and push on the robot to guide its behavior [5].…”

Bibliometric Analysis of Social Robotics Research: Identifying Research Trends and Knowledgebase

“…The main literature targets the development of safe controllers for the task of object handover [87], but also general frameworks, such as cloud networked robotics, are studied [88]. Finally, HRI Sub-cluster 10 covers the difference in interacting with robots versus on-screen agents or characters [82].…”