Synthesizing Robot Motions Adapted to Human Presence

Abstract

With robotics hardware becoming more and more safe and compliant, robots are not far from entering our homes. The robot, that will share the same environment with humans, will be expected to consider the geometry of the interaction and to perform intelligent space sharing.In this case, even the simplest tasks, e.g. handing over an object to a person, raise important questions such as: where the task should be achieved?; how to place the robot relatively to the human in order to ease the human action?; how to hand over an object?; and more generally, how to move in a relatively constrained environment in the presence of humans?

How Should a Robot Approach Two People?

“…Although path planners for social robots exist (Kessler et al, 2011;Sisbot et al, 2010;Torta et al, 2011), the robot in this work was controlled by the experimenter to focus on acquisition of participant comfort data. This was done to reduce the time required to obtain experimental data.…”

“…Dautenhahn et al (2006) reports that robot approaches from a front-left or front-right direction are the most comfortable, as they are often perceived to be less confrontational than a direct, front-on approach. This understanding of a person's 'comfort profile' when approached by a robot has been incorporated into path planners that guide a robot's approach to a person in a social environment (Kessler, Schroeter, & Gross, 2011;Sisbot, Marin-Urias, Broquere, Sidobre, & Alami, 2010;Torta, Cuijpers, Juola, & van der Pol, 2011).…”

Toward safe close-proximity human-robot interaction with standard industrial robots

“…Prior work that has taken this point into consideration evaluated parameters including the human's field of vision, posture, and kinematics when planning safe and comfortable robot paths [7], [8].…”

Towards a cooperative framework for interactive manipulation involving a human and a humanoid

“…However, although simple verbal task definition is often enough for human understanding, finding precise mathematical task descriptions for robot control may be a complex procedure. For that reason, some works found in the literature focus on the execution of specific cooperative tasks only, e.g., handing over [5], [6], crank-rotation [7] or carrying a large object in an indoor environment while avoiding obstacles [8].…”