A human-inspired controller for fluid human-robot handovers

Abstract

Handovers 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 humanrobot handovers are smooth and reduce internal forces with the human compared to traditional switching approaches.