Enhancing Perceived Safety in Human–Robot Collaborative Construction Using Immersive Virtual Environments

Advances in robotics now permit humans to work collaboratively with robots. However, humans often feel unsafe working alongside robots. Our knowledge of how to help humans overcome this issue is limited by two challenges. One, it is difficult, expensive and time-consuming to prototype robots and set up various work situations needed to conduct studies in this area. Two, we lack strong theoretical models to predict and explain perceived safety and its influence on human–robot work collaboration (HRWC). To address these issues, we introduce the Robot Acceptance Safety Model (RASM) and employ immersive virtual environments (IVEs) to examine perceived safety of working on tasks alongside a robot. Results from a between-subjects experiment done in an IVE show that separation of work areas between robots and humans increases perceived safety by promoting team identification and trust in the robot. In addition, the more participants felt it was safe to work with the robot, the more willing they were to work alongside the robot in the future.University of Michigan Mcubed Grant: Virtual Prototyping of Human-Robot Collaboration in Unstructured Construction EnvironmentsPeer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145620/1/You et al. forthcoming in AutCon.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145620/4/You et al. 2018.pdfDescription of You et al. 2018.pdf : Published Versio

Design and development of miniature wearable haptic interfaces for the fingertips

Conference of 7th IEEE World Haptics Conference, WHC 2017 ; Conference Date: 6 June 2017 Through 9 June 2017; Conference Code:129557International audienceThe recent availability of high performance and cost effective head mounted displays generates a considerable interest for Virtual Reality, both for professional applications and for the mass market. Users can now be efficiently immersed in virtual worlds, with a high quality 3D visual and auditory feedback. They can also interact with the environment using RGBD cameras or 6 Degrees of Freedom (DoFs) wands. To date however, the commercially available systems do not provide more than vibratory feedback and the users cannot really feel the simulated environments. Therefore a more complete haptic feedback is required. Within this context, wearable haptics appear as a promising solution. This paper introduces such a 2 DoF miniature haptic interface for the fingertips. This device allows applying shear forces in 2D, with an amplitude of movement of ±2mm and a force above 2.7N in any direction. It weights only 22g and its dimensions favorably compares to the state of the art

Evaluation of Hand-Tracking Systems in Teleoperation and Virtual Dexterous Manipulation

International audienceThe quality of robotic dexterous manipulation, in real or in virtual environments, relies on a fine control of the fingertips to perform stable grasps and inside-hand manipulation. In practice, teleoperating a robotic hand requires to capture the human hand configuration. If the user manipulates objects with fingertips, the acquisition of their motion must be accurate enough to produce realistic manipulation at the robot hand or its virtual avatar. In this context, one challenge is to accurately capture the motion of the human hand. The performances of three different hand-tracking devices are evaluated in this paper: two data gloves, the VRFree and the Manus VR, and a vision-based system, the Leap Motion Controller. To this end, the positions of the human hand joints and fingertips are captured while performing several tasks, with a high-precision motion capture system as reference, and with the tested devices. The accuracy of the measured joint angles and fingertips positions is compared for the different systems. Specific measurement configurations are considered by varying the hand orientation and the distances to the sensors. The strengths and weaknesses of these different systems are deduced from the experiments. This system review gives insights into the relevance of hand-tracking devices for remote robotic or virtual manipulation