Subjective evaluation for manoeuvrability of a robot cooperating with human

Abstract

Robots will be expected to be made human-friendly and to execute tasks in co-operation with humans. Control systems for such robots should be designed so as to work adapting to human characteristics. We have developed a control method for the robot carrying an object with a human smoothly. To make the controller of the robot, we investigate cooperation force characteristics of the two humans and develop a variable impedance control for a robot. In this paper the developed variable impedance control for a robot is evaluated subjectively. From the results of the subjective evaluation, the proposed variable impedance control was proved to be effective.