A Human-Inspired Controller for Fluid Human-Robot Handovers
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Handover are seamless events that occur frequently and naturally between people.
Although previous works have focused on the design of robot handover controllers synthesizing one of the phases of a handover~(approaching, passing, or retracting) in an isolated manner, we take a different approach and treat the handover as a single continuous entity.
In this paper we present a novel bi-directional and human-inspired handover controller using insights we learned from human-human experiments.
We model the dynamics of the handover in a continuous and time-independent way yielding robust and fluid behavior.
We implemented our approach on a robot platform consisting of a 7-DoF robotic arm with a 16-DoF humanoid hand.
Our results show that resulting human-robot handovers are smooth and reduce internal forces with the human compared to traditional switching approaches.
Authors: José R. Medina, Felix Duvallet, Murali Karnam and Aude Billard