The Role of Roles: Physical Cooperation between Humans and Robots

Since the strict separation of working spaces of humans and robots has experienced a softening due to recent robotics research achievements, close interaction of humans and robots comes rapidly into reach. In this context, physical human–robot interaction raises a number of questions regarding a desired intuitive robot behavior. The continuous bilateral information and energy exchange requires an appropriate continuous robot feedback. Investigating a cooperative manipulation task, the desired behavior is a combination of an urge to fulfill the task, a smooth instant reactive behavior to human force inputs and an assignment of the task effort to the cooperating agents. In this paper, a formal analysis of human–robot cooperative load transport is presented. Three different possibilities for the assignment of task effort are proposed. Two proposed dynamic role exchange mechanisms adjust the robot’s urge to complete the task based on the human feedback. For comparison, a static role allocation strategy not relying on the human agreement feedback is investigated as well. All three role allocation mechanisms are evaluated in a user study that involves large-scale kinesthetic interaction and full-body human motion. Results show tradeoffs between subjective and objective performance measures stating a clear objective advantage of the proposed dynamic role allocation scheme

Measurement of the Goos-Hanchen shift in a microwave cavity

We present our measurements of the Goos-Hanchen shift (GHS) in a two-dimensional dielectric microwave cavity. Microwave beams are generated by a suitable superposition of the spherical waves generated by an array of antennas; the resulting beams are then reflected at a planar interface. By measuring the electric field including its phase, Poynting vectors of the incoming and reflected beams can be extracted, which in turn are used to find the incoming angle and the positions where the beam hits the interface and where it is reflected. These positions directly yield the GHS. The results are compared to the classical Artmann result and a numerical calculation using Gaussian beams