Cooperative manipulation between humans and teleoperated agents

Robonaut is a humanoid robot designed by the Robotic Systems Technology Branch at NASA's Johnson Space Center in a collaborative effort with DARPA. This paper describes the implementation of haptic feedback into Robonaut. We conducted a cooperative manipulation task, inserting a flexible beam into an instrumented receptacle. This task was performed while both a human at the worksite and the teleoperated robot grasped the flexible beam simultaneously. Peak forces in the receptacle were consistently lower when the human operator was provided with kinesthetic force feedback in addition to other modalities of feedback such as gestures and voice commands. These findings are encouraging as the Dexterous Robotics Lab continues to implement force feedback into its teleoperator hardware architecture.