Experimental analysis of dominance in haptic collaboration

Recent research focuses on developing robots that are meant to be partners of humans instead of pure machines. This makes enhanced communication necessary. Especially in scenarios embedding physical interaction between the two partners dominance is an urgent matter. To overcome one-sided dominance as in passive following or trajectory replay in favor of intuitive collaboration, human-human collaboration and the involved dominance distribution needs to be addressed. Even though some attempts are reported in literature, to our best knowledge no experimental analysis of dominance distribution in a kinesthetic task reports actual values of dominance. Therefore, the current paper discusses dominance measures appropriate in haptic interaction and investigates the dominance distribution in a tracking-task experiment. In the analysis we focus on the influence of mutual haptic feedback between the partners on dominance distribution by contrasting this condition to vision-only partner feedback trials. Furthermore, this paper investigates the consistency of dominance behavior across different partners based on methodologies transferred from social psychology. Results show that participants work with a dominance distribution, whereby the feedback condition does not effect this distribution. A high amount of variability in individual dominance behavior can be considered person dependent. Here, feedback has an effect as the dominance behavior is even more stable across partners when mutual haptic feedback is provided.