Multi-robot manipulation controlled by a human with haptic feedback

The interaction of a single human with a team of cooperative robots, which collaboratively manipulate an object, poses a great challenge by means of the numerous possibilities of issuing commands to the team or providing appropriate feedback to the human. In this paper we propose a formation-based approach in order to avoid deformations of the object and to virtually couple the human to the formation. Here the human can be interpreted as a leader in a leader-follower formation with the robotic manipulators being the followers. The results of a controllability analysis in such a leader-follower formation suggest that it is beneficial to measure the state of the human (leader) by all physically cooperating manipulators (followers). The proposed approach is evaluated in a full-scale multi-robot cooperative manipulation experiment with humans.