Task-Based Role Adaptation for Human-Robot Cooperative Object Handling

In this letter, we propose a task-based role allocation control scheme for the cooperative manipulation of a rigid-body object held jointly by a human and a robot. The task-based allocation scheme allows an assistive robot to take an active role when the task is known. To deal with the translation/rotation problem, we define rotation and translation as distinct parameterized tasks. The task that describes better human intention is identified by solving an optimization problem with a predefined adjustable similarity factor for each task. The role of the robot while performing the identified task can be directly tuned as a parameter associated with the percentage of the required force for performing the corresponding task and is predefined for each task and degree of freedom, in all degrees of freedom, independently. The performance of the proposed control scheme is evaluated via simulation and experiments on a real robot setup.