Human-robot cooperative object swinging

This paper investigates goal-directed cooperative object swinging as a novel physical human-robot interaction scenario. We develop an energy-based control concept, which enables a robot to cooperate with a human in a goal-directed swing-up task. The robot can be assigned to be a leader or an actively contributing follower. We conduct a virtual reality experiment to compare effort sharing and performance of mixed human-human and human-robot dyads. The leader and the follower controllers yield similar results compared to their human standard.