Spatiotemporal Movement Planning and Rapid Adaptation for Manual Interaction

Abstract

Many everyday tasks require the ability of two or more individuals to coordinate their actions with others to increase efficiency. Such an increase in efficiency can often be observed even after only very few trials. Previous work suggests that such behavioral adaptation can be explained within a probabilistic framework that integrates sensory input and prior experience. Even though higher cognitive abilities such as intention recognition have been described as probabilistic estimation depending on an internal model of the other agent, it is not clear whether much simpler daily interaction is consistent with a probabilistic framework. Here, we investigate whether the mechanisms underlying efficient coordination during manual interactions can be understood as probabilistic optimization. For this purpose we studied in several experiments a simple manual handover task concentrating on the action of the receiver. We found that the duration until the receiver reacts to the handover decreases over trials, but strongly depends on the position of the handover. We then replaced the human deliverer by different types of robots to further investigate the influence of the delivering movement on the reaction of the receiver. Durations were found to depend on movement kinematics and the robot’s joint configuration. Modeling the task was based on the assumption that the receiver’s decision to act is based on the accumulated evidence for a specific handover position. The evidence for this handover position is collected from observing the hand movement of the deliverer over time and, if appropriate, by integrating this sensory likelihood with prior expectation that is updated over trials. The close match of model simulations and experimental results shows that the efficiency of handover coordination can be explained by an adaptive probabilistic fusion of a-priori expectation and online estimation.

Using gaze patterns to predict task intent in collaboration

“…The capability to interpret others' intentions and anticipate actions is critical in performing joint actions (Sebanz and Knoblich, 2009 ; Huber et al, 2013 ). Prior research has explored how reading intention and performing anticipatory actions might benefit robots in providing assistance to their users, highlighting the importance of intention prediction in joint actions between humans and robots (Sakita et al, 2004 ; Hoffman and Breazeal, 2007 ).…”

Humans adjust their grip force when passing an object according to the observed speed of the partner’s reaching out movement

“…After each series an evaluation questionnaire was completed (for a total of 24 questionnaires). The questionnaire after S1 aimed to assess the fluency of the handover experienced by the receiver to a semi-novel yet poorly predictable passer’s behaviour (Huber et al 2008b , 2013 ; Glasauer et al 2010 ). The questionnaire after S2 instead, assessed the perceived fluency for stereotyped and predictable handovers.…”

“…Several studies involving robotic agents investigated humans’ preferences and how their perception of fluency can be influenced during the handover task. The majority of these studies focused on the effects of the trajectory (Basili et al 2009 ; Prada et al 2013 ), and of the velocity profile (Huber et al 2008a , b ) of the reaching movement; on the effects of the position of both the passer’s (Cakmak et al 2011 ; Strabala et al 2013 ; Huber et al 2013 ; Parastegari et al 2017 ) and the receiver’s arm (Pan et al 2018a , b ) used to handover the object; on the effects of other subtle non-verbal clues used to initiate an handover (Strabala et al 2012 ; Moon et al 2014 ). Only few studies focused on the modulation of the GF during the object release.…”

Mechanisms and capabilities for human robot collaboration

“…The benefit of transferring anticipatory action to a human-robot context is also shown in [47], where a significant improvement of task efficiency compared to reactive behavior was possible. For an extensive evaluation of these hypothesis, we want to refer to previous publications [1], [48], [49], [50].…”