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A human-inspired controller for robot-human object handovers : a study of grip and load forces in handovers and the design and implementation of a novel handover controller

University of British Columbia

Handing over objects is a common basic task that arises between people in many cooperative scenarios. On a daily basis, we effortlessly and successfully perform countless unscripted handovers without any explicit communication. However, handing over an object to a person is a challenging task for robotic “hands”, and the resulting interaction is often unnatural. To improve human-robot cooperation, the work described in this thesis has led to the design of a human-inspired handover controller based on analysis and characterization of the haptic interaction during human-to-human object handover. The first experiment in this thesis documents novel experimental work done to measure the dynamic interaction in human-human handovers. The grip forces and load forces experienced by the giver and the receiver during a handover are examined, and the key features are identified. Based on these experimental results, guidelines for designing human-robot handovers are proposed. Next, this thesis describes a handover controller model that enables robots to hand over objects to people in a safe, efficient, and intuitive manner, and an implementation of the handover controller on a Willow Garage PR2 robot is documented. Finally, a second experiment is presented, which compares various tunings of the novel controller in a user study. Results show that the novel controller yields more efficient and more intuitive robot-to-human handovers when compared to existing handover controllers.

Text

2013-04-30

Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/43489

Biomedical Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/