Useful Interactions Between Human and Robotic Agents Performing a Cooperative Assembly Task

Abstract

NASA's Human Space Flight program depends heavily on spacewalks performed by human astronauts. These Extra -Vehicular Activities (EVAs) are risk y, expensive and complex. In collaboration with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NASA is developing a robotic astronaut's assistant called Robonaut that can boost EVA productivity and help conserve human EVA hours. Robonaut is a teleo perated, anthropomorphic robot equipped with human -like dexterous manipulation and zero -G locomotion capabilities. An experiment is conducted to study human -robot interaction in the context of a simplified EVA assembly task in which Robonaut works side -by -side with a human subject. Agent interactions are carefully controlled to examine the effects of increasingly sophisticated forms of communication on overall task performance. Performance metrics include task completion time and interaction forces and torq ues.