Do You Need a Hand?: a Bimanual Robotic Dressing Assistance Scheme

Developing physically assistive robots capable of dressing assistance has the potential to significantly improve the lives of the elderly and disabled population. However, most robotics dressing strategies considered a single robot only, which greatly limited the performance of the dressing assistance. In fact, healthcare professionals...

Disagreement-Aware Variable Impedance Control for Online Learning of Physical Human-Robot Cooperation Tasks

In order to make the coexistence between humans and robots a reality, we must understand how they may cooperate more effectively. Modern robots, empowered with reliable controls and advanced machine learning reasoning can face this challenge. In this article, we presented a Disagreement- Aware Variable Impedance (DAVI) Controller, where the...

Learning Task-Parameterized Skills From Few Demonstrations

Moving away from repetitive tasks, robots nowadays demand versatile skills that adapt to different situations. Task-parameterized learning improves the generalization of motion policies by encoding relevant contextual information in the task parameters, hence enabling flexible task executions. However, training such a policy often requires...

Predicting and Optimizing Ergonomics in Physical Human-Robot Cooperation Tasks

This paper presents a method to incorporate ergonomics into the optimization of action sequences for bi-manual human-robot cooperation tasks with continuous physical interaction. Our first contribution is a novel computational model of the human that allows prediction of an ergonomics assessment corresponding to each step in a task. The model...

Learning sequential force interaction skills

Learning skills from kinesthetic demonstrations is a promising way of minimizing the gap between human manipulation abilities and those of robots. We propose an approach to learn sequential force interaction skills from such demonstrations. The demonstrations are decomposed into a set of movement primitives by inferring the underlying...

Head-tracked off-axis perspective projection improves gaze readability of 3D virtual avatars

Virtual avatars have been employed in many contexts, from simple conversational agents to communicating the internal state and intentions of large robots when interacting with humans. Rarely, however, are they employed in scenarios which require non-verbal communication of spatial information or dynamic interaction from a variety of perspectives...

Human-robot cooperative object manipulation with contact changes

This paper presents a system for cooperatively manipulating large objects between a human and a robot. This physical interaction system is designed to handle, transport, or manipulate large objects of different shapes in cooperation with a human. Unique points are the bi-manual physical cooperation, the sequential characteristic of the...

Mixture of Attractors: A novel movement primitive representation for learning motor skills from demonstrations

In this letter, we introduce Mixture of Attractors, a novel movement primitive representation that allows for learning complex object-relative movements. The movement primitive representation inherently supports multiple coordinate frames, enabling the system to generalize a skill to unseen object positions and orientations. In contrast to...