Editorial: Mapping human sensory-motor skills for manipulation onto the design and control of robots

Editorial on the Research Topic Mapping Human Sensory-Motor Skills for Manipulation Onto the Design and Control of Robot

Haptic wrist guidance using vibrations for Human-Robot teams

Human-Robot teams can efficiently operate in several scenarios including Urban Search and Rescue (USAR). Robots can access areas too small or deep for a person, can begin surveying larger areas that people are not permitted to enter and can carry sensors and instruments. One important aspect in this cooperative framework is the way robots and humans can communicate during rescue operation. Vision and audio modalities may result not efficient in case of reduced visibility or high noise. A promising way to guarantee effective communications between robot and human in a team is the exploitation of haptic signals. In this work, we present a possible solution to let a robot guide the position of a human operator’s hand by using vibrations. We demonstrate that an armband embedding four vibrating motors is enough to guide the wrist of an operator along a predefined path or in a target location. The results proposed can be exploited in human-robot teams. For instance, when the robot detects the position of a sensible target, it can guide the wrist of the operator in such position following an optimal path

On the Simulation of Soft Finger Contact Model with Rolling in Haptics

Computation of contact point trajectories and forces exchanged between two bodies in contact are relevant to several disciplines. The solutions proposed in the literature are often too complex to be implemented in real time simulations, especially if rolling effects are considered. In this paper an algorithm for fast simulation of soft-finger contact model with rolling effects is proposed. The main idea is to use Euler angle decomposition algorithm to quantitatively describe the torque exchanged about the normal at the contact point and the motion of the contact point due to rolling. The proposed algorithm is validated with simulations and a preliminary application to Haptics is proposed. This approach has been exploited in haptic rendering, but can be easily extended to other applications requiring real-time computation, e. g. multi-body modelling of robotic hand grasps

Bilateral Haptic Collaboration for Human-Robot Cooperative Tasks

The aim of this letter is to introduce the concept of bilateral haptic cooperation as a novel paradigm for human-robot cooperative tasks. The approach is demonstrated with a system composed of a soft gripper and a wearable interface. The soft gripper, called CoGripper, has been designed to guarantee a safe interaction giving the possibility to the operator to reconfigure the device according to the object to be grasped. The wearable interface is used to control the open/close motion of the gripper and to feedback information about important task parameters, e.g., the grasp tightness. The result is a bilateral haptic collaboration where human and robot bidirectionally communicate through the interface. The user interaction with the system is extremely intuitive and simple. We performed three user studies to prove the effectiveness of bilateral haptic collaboration involving ten subjects. Results confirmed that the use of the wearable interface reduces the time to accomplish a cooperative task and enables a better control of the grasp tightness