Using psychophysiological feedback to enhance physical human robot interaction in a cooperative scenario

”Human state aware” systems, may be able to improve physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) by adapting their behavior and cooperation level accordingly to human psychophysiological feedback. This paper reviews the impact of the emotions on the motor control performance, and studies the possibility of improving the perceived skill/challenge relation on a multimodal neural rehabilitation scenario. For this purpose, a biocooperative controller that modulate the assistance given by a robotic haptic interface in reaction to undesirable physical and mental states was designed. Open and closed loop experiments made over eleven non impaired subjects, shows that psychophisiological feedback estimates, can help considerably on improving pHRI in a cooperative scenario.