Human Grasping Force Prediction, Measurement, and Validation for Human-Robot Lifting

Abstract

In this study, a 13 degrees of freedom (DOFs) three-dimensional (3D) human arm model and a 10 DOFs 3D robotic arm model are used to validate the grasping force for human-robot lifting motion prediction. The human arm and robotic arm are modeled in Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) representation. In addition, the 3D box is modeled as a floating-base rigid body with 6 global DOFs. The human-box and robot-box interactions are characterized as a collection of grasping forces. The joint torque squares of human arm and robot arm are minimized subjected to physics and task constraints. The design variables include (1) control points of cubic B-splines of joint angle profiles of the human arm, robotic arm, and box; and (2) the discretized grasping forces during lifting. Both numerical and experimental human-robot liftings were performed with a 2 kg box. The simulation reports the human arm’s joint angle profiles, joint torque profiles, and grasping force profiles. The comparisons of the joint angle profiles and grasping force profiles between experiment and simulation are presented. The simulated joint angle profiles have similar trends to the experimental data. It is concluded that human and robot share the load during lifting process, and the predicted human grasping force matches the measured experimental grasping force reasonably well.