Haptic Communication for Collaborative Robotics

When a human dyad jointly manipulates an object, they must communicate about their intended motion plans. Some of that collaboration is achieved through the motion of the manipulated object itself, which we call ``haptic communication.''  In this work, we captured the motion of human-human dyads moving an object together with one participant leading a motion plan about which the follower is uninformed. We then captured the same human participants manipulating the same object with a robot collaborator. By tracking the motion of the shared object using a low-cost IMU, we can directly compare human-human shared manipulation to the motion of those same participants interacting with the robot. Intra-study and post-study questionnaires provided participant feedback on the collaborations, indicating that the human-human collaborations are significantly more fluent, and analysis of the IMU data indicates that it captures objective differences in the motion profiles of the conditions.  The differences in objective and subjective measures of accuracy and fluency between the human-human and human-robot trials motivate future research into improving robot assistants for physical tasks by enabling them to send and receive anthropomorphic haptic signals.