Caring About the Human Operator: Haptic Shared Control for Enhanced User Comfort in Robotic Telemanipulation

Abstract

Haptic shared control enables a human operator and an autonomous controller to share the control of a robotic system using haptic active constraints. It has been used in robotic teleoperation for different purposes, such as navigating along paths minimizing the torques requested to the manipulator or avoiding possibly dangerous areas of the workspace. However, few works have focused on using these ideas to account for the user's comfort. In this work, we present an innovative haptic-enabled shared control approach aimed at minimizing the user's workload during a teleoperated manipulation task. Using an inverse kinematic model of the human arm and the Rapid Upper Limb Assessment (RULA) metric, the proposed approach estimates the current user's comfort online. From this measure and an a priori knowledge of the task, we then generate dynamic active constraints guiding the users towards a successful completion of the task, along directions that improve their posture and increase their comfort. Studies with human subjects show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, yielding a 30% perceived reduction of the workload with respect to using standard guided humanin-the-loop teleoperation.

Human-Inspired Haptic-Enabled Learning From Prehensile Move Demonstrations

“…Teleoperation of the 7-DoF robotic manipulator-To achieve high motion fidelity, we mapped the velocity of the grounded haptic interface to that of the slave robotic endeffector, using an approach similar to that employed in [36], [37]. Let x m = (p m , R m ) ∈ R 3 × SO(3) be the pose of the master interface end-effector, and x s = (p s , R s ) ∈ R 3 ×SO(3) the pose of the slave end-effector, both expressed w.r.t.…”

Human-Robot Interaction Review: Challenges and Solutions for Modern Industrial Environments

“…Lastly, physical contact does not happen directly between humans and robots; they are based on haptic teleoperation. This kind of solution is based on some joystick the operator handles to telecommand the robot and accomplishing a picking task [100].…”

Asymmetric Bilateral Telerobotic System With Shared Autonomy Control

“…For orientation mapping, however, it is a much more difficult task for the operator in many industrial or surgical applications [20]. In the existing studies of the teleoperation with multiple DoF, generally, a joint-to-joint mapping is established by supposing that the master and the slave have same structures [14], [21], [22], or the kinematics redundancy is ignored and no orientation regulation is given [5], [23], [24], or the regulation cannot support full range of orientation control due to the limitation of the master's mechanical structure [25], [26]. Even if a good orientation mapping is available, it will be an exhausting job for an operator to simultaneously regulate position and orientation of a slave robot, especially in the situation of multiple robots control and large robot structures difference [27].…”