Grasping and guiding a human with a humanoid robot

This paper presents a novel approach for tightly-coupled human-robot interaction that consists of a robot actively grasping and guiding a human being. We propose a multi-stage procedure that particularly considers exceptional conditions which allow the human to quit the interaction at any stage. The system comprises a combination of different sensor modalities to supervise the grasping and guiding procedure and to guarantee a safe human-robot interaction. In particular, a capacitive sensor in the palm of the robot hand allows a contactless detection of the human while approaching. Finally, experimental results are presented.