Bilateral human-robot interaction with physical contact

In this paper it is presented a control strategy for bilateral human-robot interaction with contact, recognizing human intent to control movement of a non-holonomic mobile robot. The human intention is modeled by mechanical impedance, sensing the force and direction desired by the human to guide the robot through unstructured environments. Robot dynamics are included in order to improve the interaction performance. Stability analysis of the proposed control system is proved by using Lyapunov theory. Real experiments of the human-robot interaction show the performance of the proposed controllers.