Towards a cooperative framework for interactive manipulation involving a human and a humanoid

In this paper we propose a novel approach for interactive manipulation involving a human and a humanoid. The interaction is represented by means of the relative configuration between the human's and the robot's hands. Based on this principle and a set of mathematical tools also proposed in the paper, a large set of tasks can be represented intuitively. We also introduce the concept of simultaneous handling using mirrored movements, where the human controls the robot and simultaneously interacts with it by means of a common manipulated object. Illustrative experiments are performed to validate the proposed techniques.