Role allocation through haptics in physical human-robot interaction

This paper presents a summary of our efforts to enable dynamic role allocation between humans and robots in physical collaboration tasks. A major goal in physical human-robot interaction research is to develop tacit and natural communication between partners. In previous work, we suggested that the communication between a human and a robot would benefit from a decision making process in which the robot can dynamically adjust its control level during the task based on the intentions of the human. In order to do this, we define leader and follower roles for the partners, and using a role exchange mechanism, we enable the partners to negotiate solely through force information to exchange roles. We show that when compared to an “equal control” condition, the role exchange mechanism improves task performance and the joint efficiency of the partners.