Fitts’ law in the presence of interface inertia

Abstract

Collaborative robots are advancing the healthcare frontier, in applications such as rehabilitation and physical therapy. Effective physical collaboration in human-robot systems require an understanding of partner intent and capability. Various modalities exist to convey such information between human agents, however, natural interactions between humans and robots are difficult to characterise and achieve. To enhance inter-agent communication, predictive models for human movement have been devised. One such model is Fitts' law. Many works using Fitts' law rely on massless interfaces. However, this coupling between human and robot, and the inertial effects experienced, may affect the predictive ability of Fitts' law. Experiments were conducted on human-robot dyads during a target-directed force exertion task. From the interactions, the results indicate that there is no observable effect regarding Fitts' law's predictive ability.