Kinematic modeling and control for human-robot cooperation considering different interaction roles

This paper presents a novel approach for the description of physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) tasks that involve two-arm coordination, and where tasks are described by the relative pose between the human hand and the robot hand. We develop a unified kinematic model that takes into account the human-robot system from a holistic point of view, and we also propose a kinematic control strategy for pHRI that comprises different levels of shared autonomy. Since the kinematic model takes into account the complete human-robot interaction system and the kinematic control law is closed loop at the interaction level, the kinematic constraints of the task are enforced during its execution. Experiments are performed in order to validate the proposed approach, including a particular case where the robot controls the human arm by means of functional electrical stimulation (FES), which may potentially provide useful solutions for the interaction between assistant robots and impaired individuals (e.g., quadriplegics and hemiplegics). © 2014 Cambridge University Press.