Experimental validation of functional compliance in an anthropomorphic personal robot

The development of humanoid robots and their application as personal robots introduce problems related to the interaction of robots with humans and with environments specifically designed for human beings. In tasks where human-robot cooperation is required, compliance of the robot arm can provide a helpful solution, not only to ensure safety, but especially to increase the robot functionality and usability. The concept of functional compliance is illustrated and an experimental validation is reported, where the functionality of an anthropomorphic robot arm is comparatively assessed with and without compliant control. The paper describes the implementation of a compliant control scheme on an anthropomorphic robotic manipulator, illustrates in detail the methodology adopted for the experimental comparative validation and reports the results obtained in the execution of a sample task by a set of potential users, showing the increased performance in the case of compliant control. Indications are also provided on the improvement of acceptability, which is also affected by the enhanced performance.