Heterogeneous function-based human/robot cooperations

Abstract

Explores a new dimension in the area of human/robot cooperation: heterogeneous human/robot cooperations. The heterogeneity of human and robot functions can be characterized by the fact that humans are intelligent while robots are fast, powerful and accurate. The important issue, in light of human/robot heterogeneity, is how to plan and control a robotic operation such that the human and the robot can cooperate in a complementary manner. In the paper, the specific problems to be discussed include developing a perceptive action reference frame to integrate human/robot heterogeneous functions; and modeling, analyzing and designing an integrated human/robot system with respect to the perceptive reference frame. These lead to the development of theoretical results on stability of human/robot cooperations, and special methods for planning and control of human/robot integrated systems. The implementations and experimental results presented demonstrate the advantages of the proposed methods.