Coupling of Arm Movements during Human-Robot Interaction: the handover case

Abstract

Collaboration involves understanding the action of others, as well as acting in a way that can be understood by others. One of those tasks is the handover. In this paper, we study the behaviour of humans during the handover and design the mechanisms allowing a robot to learn from that behaviour.We analyse and model the arm movements of humans while handing over objects to one another. The contributions of this paper are the following: (i) a computational model that captures the behaviour of the “giver” and “receiver” of the object, by coupling the arm motion; (ii) discuss this approach amidst a previous coupling strategy; and (iii) embedded the model in the iCub robot for human to robot handovers.Our results show that: (i) the robot can coordinate with the human to timely and safely receive the object; (ii) the robot behaves in a “human-like” manner while receiving the object; and (iii) our approach has significant advantages to the previous approach.