Robot-Human Handovers Based on Trust

We present a new approach to payload handovers between robots and humans in collaborative human-co-robot operations. The key innovation is the incorporation of robot trust (in the human) in the underlying robot motion planning algorithm. Using a weighted Jacobian pseudoinverse algorithm, the robot motions are varied (trading off collision risk against task efficiency) based on the current value of trust. The targeted application is small-scale manufacturing, but the approach can be applied to many forms of robot-human handovers and interactions.