Human-Robot Interaction with Robust Prediction of Movement Intention Surpasses Manual Control

Abstract

Designing robotic assistance devices for manipulation tasks is challenging. This work aims at improving accuracy and usability of physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) where a user interacts with a physical robotic device (e.g., a human operated manipulator or exoskeleton) by transmitting signals which need to be interpreted by the machine. Typically these signals are used as an open-loop control, but this approach has several limitations such as low take-up and high cognitive burden for the user. In contrast, a control framework is proposed that can respond robustly and efficiently to intentions of a user by reacting proactively to their commands. The key insight is to include context- and user-awareness in the controller, improving decision making on how to assist the user. Context-awareness is achieved by creating a set of candidate grasp targets and reach-to grasp trajectories in a cluttered scene. User-awareness is implemented as a linear time-variant feedback controller (TV-LQR) over the generated trajectories to facilitate the motion towards the most likely intention of a user. The system also dynamically recovers from incorrect predictions. Experimental results in a virtual environment of two degrees of freedom control show the capability of this approach to outperform manual control. By robustly predicting the user’s intention, the proposed controller allows the subject to achieve superhuman performance in terms of accuracy and thereby usability.