3 research outputs found
Autonomous Object Handover Using Wrist Tactile Information
Grasping in an uncertain environment is a topic of great
interest in robotics. In this paper we focus on the challenge of object
handover capable of coping with a wide range of different and unspecified
objects. Handover is the action of object passing an object from one agent
to another. In this work handover is performed from human to robot. We
present a robust method that relies only on the force information from
the wrist and does not use any vision and tactile information from the
fingers. By analyzing readings from a wrist force sensor, models of tactile
response for receiving and releasing an object were identified and tested
during validation experiments
GoferBot: A Visual Guided Human-Robot Collaborative Assembly System
The current transformation towards smart manufacturing has led to a growing
demand for human-robot collaboration (HRC) in the manufacturing process.
Perceiving and understanding the human co-worker's behaviour introduces
challenges for collaborative robots to efficiently and effectively perform
tasks in unstructured and dynamic environments. Integrating recent data-driven
machine vision capabilities into HRC systems is a logical next step in
addressing these challenges. However, in these cases, off-the-shelf components
struggle due to generalisation limitations. Real-world evaluation is required
in order to fully appreciate the maturity and robustness of these approaches.
Furthermore, understanding the pure-vision aspects is a crucial first step
before combining multiple modalities in order to understand the limitations. In
this paper, we propose GoferBot, a novel vision-based semantic HRC system for a
real-world assembly task. It is composed of a visual servoing module that
reaches and grasps assembly parts in an unstructured multi-instance and dynamic
environment, an action recognition module that performs human action prediction
for implicit communication, and a visual handover module that uses the
perceptual understanding of human behaviour to produce an intuitive and
efficient collaborative assembly experience. GoferBot is a novel assembly
system that seamlessly integrates all sub-modules by utilising implicit
semantic information purely from visual perception
Object Handovers: a Review for Robotics
This article surveys the literature on human-robot object handovers. A
handover is a collaborative joint action where an agent, the giver, gives an
object to another agent, the receiver. The physical exchange starts when the
receiver first contacts the object held by the giver and ends when the giver
fully releases the object to the receiver. However, important cognitive and
physical processes begin before the physical exchange, including initiating
implicit agreement with respect to the location and timing of the exchange.
From this perspective, we structure our review into the two main phases
delimited by the aforementioned events: 1) a pre-handover phase, and 2) the
physical exchange. We focus our analysis on the two actors (giver and receiver)
and report the state of the art of robotic givers (robot-to-human handovers)
and the robotic receivers (human-to-robot handovers). We report a comprehensive
list of qualitative and quantitative metrics commonly used to assess the
interaction. While focusing our review on the cognitive level (e.g.,
prediction, perception, motion planning, learning) and the physical level
(e.g., motion, grasping, grip release) of the handover, we briefly discuss also
the concepts of safety, social context, and ergonomics. We compare the
behaviours displayed during human-to-human handovers to the state of the art of
robotic assistants, and identify the major areas of improvement for robotic
assistants to reach performance comparable to human interactions. Finally, we
propose a minimal set of metrics that should be used in order to enable a fair
comparison among the approaches.Comment: Review paper, 19 page