Human-robot cooperation system with mechanical impedance emulation for friendly human perception

Many professional or daily activities require load displacement by human arms or human powered vehicles. Those activities may lead to muscle-skeleton diseases in load-carrying professionals as in people carrying their personal belongs. To help prevent those injuries, the scientific community has developed human-robot cooperation systems which are implemented through a robot that works as a force multiplier equipment and the human that works as the positioning or force setpoint generator. In order to provide the force multiplication feature and also to care about the human perception during the cooperative task, this paper presents the design and implementation of a robot that is dedicated to help in translational displacements while emulating an active mechanical impedance that provides a friendly perception to humans.