The Effects of Proactive Release Behaviors During Human-Robot Handovers

Most research on human-robot handovers focuses on how the robot should approach human receivers and notify them of the readiness to take an object; few studies have investigated the effects of different release behaviors. Not releasing an object when a person desires to take it breaks handover fluency and creates a bad handover experience. In this paper, we investigate the effects of different release behaviors. Specifically, we study the benefits of a proactive release, during which the robot actively detects a human grasp effort pattern. In a 36-participant user study11The study is ready to reproduce with a Baxter robot. The code and environment setup is available at https://github.com/umhan35/handover_moveit, results suggest proactive release is more efficient than rigid release (which only releases when the robot is fully stopped) and passive release (the robot detects pulling by checking if a threshold value is reached). Subjectively, the overall handover experience is improved: the proactive release is significantly better in terms of handover fluency and ease-of-taking.