Robotic waiter with physical co-manipulation capabilities

In this paper, we compare the performance of physical and non-physical interfaces for the behavior of a personal robot. The PR2 robot was programmed as a waiter with co-manipulation capabilities and experimentally tested with respect to a trajectory following task. For physical interaction (pushing/pulling), we implemented a compliance controller for compliant, stable arm positioning and a velocity based position controller for moving the robot base. Experiments were conducted to assess the effectiveness and accuracy of single and dual arm control compared to joystick teleoperation. Results indicate that the PR2 in physical collaboration with a human performs better than in teleoperation mode, as measured by task completion time while maintaining a comparable task accuracy. A result of our work is the open source, robot operating system (ROS) package pr2 cartPull, which will be shared with the robotics community.