Performance related energy exchange in haptic human-human interaction in a shared virtual object manipulation task

In order to enable intuitive physical interaction with autonomous robots as well as in collaborative multi-user virtual reality and tele-operation systems a deep understanding of human-human haptic interaction is required. In this paper the effect of haptic interaction in single and dyadic conditions is investigated. Furthermore, an energy-based framework suitable for the analysis of the underlying processes is introduced. A pursuit tracking task experiment is performed where a virtual object is manipulated, jointly by two humans and alone. The performance in terms of the root-mean-square tracking error is improved in dyadic compared to individual conditions, even though the virtual object mass is reduced to one half in the latter. Our results indicate that the interacting partners benefit from role distributions which can be associated with different energy flows.