Toward Effective Physical Human-Robot Interaction

With the fast advancement of technology, in recent years, robotics technology has significantly matured and produced robots that are able to operate in unstructured environments such as domestic environments, offices, hospitals and other human-inhabited locations. In this context, the interaction and cooperation between humans and robots has become an important and challenging aspect of robot development. Among the various kinds of possible interactions, in this Ph.D. thesis I am particularly interested in physical human-robot interaction (pHRI). In order to study how a robot can successfully engage in physical interaction with people and which factors are crucial during this kind of interaction, I investigated how humans and robots can hand over objects to each other. To study this specific interactive task I developed two robotic prototypes and conducted human-robot user studies. Although various aspects of human-robot handovers have been deeply investigated in the state of the art, during my studies I focused on three issues that have been rarely investigated so far: Human presence and motion analysis during the interaction in order to infer non-verbal communication cues and to synchronize the robot actions with the human motion; Development and evaluation of human-aware pro-active robot behaviors that enable robots to behave actively in the proximity of the human body in order to negotiate the handover location and to perform the transfer of the object; Consideration of objects grasp affordances during the handover in order to make the interaction more comfortable for the human

Visual motion estimation and tracking of rigid bodies by physical simulation

This thesis applies knowledge of the physical dynamics of objects to estimating object motion from vision when estimation from vision alone fails. It differentiates itself from existing physics-based vision by building in robustness to situations where existing visual estimation tends to fail: fast motion, blur, glare, distractors, and partial or full occlusion. A real-time physics simulator is incorporated into a stochastic framework by adding several different models of how noise is injected into the dynamics. Several different algorithms are proposed and experimentally validated on two problems: motion estimation and object tracking. The performance of visual motion estimation from colour histograms of a ball moving in two dimensions is improved considerably when a physics simulator is integrated into a MAP procedure involving non-linear optimisation and RANSAC-like methods. Process noise or initial condition noise in conjunction with a physics-based dynamics results in improved robustness on hard visual problems. A particle filter applied to the task of full 6D visual tracking of the pose an object being pushed by a robot in a table-top environment is improved on difficult visual problems by incorporating a simulator as a dynamics model and injecting noise as forces into the simulator.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

A Simulation Environment for Robot Motion Planning

We introduce Ibex, a real-time capable physics simulation framework. Ibex is ideally suited to simulate mechatronic systems as well as environments in which robot motion planning algorithms can be developed and tested. The entire control loop encountered in robotics can be simulated. This includes the simulation of robot sensors and actuators. The current implementation includes a rigid-body simulation which encompasses not only kinematic but also dynamics e#ects. It performs collision detection and resolution in real-time or faster for typical setups. The completely modular design of Ibex means the framework is easily configurable and extensible. Additional physics simulation modules covering phenomena such as electromagnetic forces can be integrated transparently. These modules can interact with existing entities to build an overall system. Ibex can communicate with external hardware through I/O interfaces, thus allowing hardware-in-theloop simulations. We present example Ibex applications from both industrial and mobile robotics. We also describe why Ibex is a real asset for robot motion planning and how we intend to apply it in this field