Toward a better understanding of the communication cues involved in a human-robot object transfer

Abstract

Handing-over objects to humans (or taking objects from them) is a key capability for a service robot. Humans are efficient and natural while performing this action and the purpose of the studies on this topic is to bring human-robot handovers to an acceptable, efficient and natural level. This paper deals with the cues that allow to make a handover look as natural as possible, and more precisely we focus on where the robot should look while performing it. In this context we propose a user study, involving 33 volunteers, who judged video sequences where they see either a human or a robot giving them an object. They were presented with different sequences where the agents (robot or human) have different gaze behaviours, and were asked to give their feeling about the sequence naturalness. In addition to this subjective measure, the volunteers were equipped with an eye tracker which enabled us to have more accurate objective measures.

Touch-Based Grasp Primitives for Soft Hands: Applications to Human-to-Robot Handover Tasks and Beyond

“…Future works will further investigate these methods for a complete handover implementation, addressing all the phases described in [4], together with an implementation of a feedback-feedforward action which could increase safety and generarization. Additional experiments will be suitably designed to evaluate HR communication [6], as well as the effectiveness and users' acceptance of different motion planners. It is important to note that our approach combines the intrinsic adaptability of the SoftHand and tactile-triggered wrist primitive control.…”

“…Human-robot (HR) handover represents a well-studied topic in robotics, see e.g. [1], [2], [3], [4] ,which comes with important challenges related to human-to-robot communication [5], human safety and acceptance [6], human intention prediction [7], human-aware planning and execution [8], [9]. According to [4], HR handover consists of three main phases, i.e.…”

What Is It to Implement a Human-Robot Joint Action?

“…When a robot is equipped with something that looks like a head, for example, people tend to consider that it should act like a head because people anthropomorphize. It means that we need to consider the entire body of the robot and not only the base or the arms of the robot for the movement even if it is not needed to achieve the action (e.g., Gharbi et al 2015;Khambhaita et al 2016). This could be linked to the concept of coordination smoother which is "any kind of modulation of one's movements that reliably has the effect of simplifying coordination" (Vesper et al 2010(Vesper et al , p. 1001).…”

Object Handovers: a Review for Robotics

“…In other words, humans are able to read other people's action intentions by observing their gaze [57]. Therefore, it is not surprising that during a handover, the use of gaze by a robot positively impacts the interaction, resulting in faster object reaching and a more natural perception of the interaction by the human receivers [58]- [60]. Similarly, gaze can have an effect on cooperation also in terms of faster human response times [61].…”