Investigating the impedance characteristic of human arm for development of robots to co-operate with human operators

Abstract

In the near future many aspect of life will be encompassed by tasks performed in co-operation with robots. As a result, robots need to be made human-friendly and to execute tasks in co-operation with humans. Control systems for such robots should be designed to work by imitating human characteristics. We aim to achieve these goals by controlling a simple one degree-of-freedom robot. First, the impedance characteristics of the human arm in a co-operative task are investigated. Then, these characteristics are implemented in a robot which performs a co-operative task with a human. The proposed control method produced good characteristics for robots co-operating with humans.