Development of a robotic teaching interface for human to human skill transfer

Abstract

The tutor-tutee hand-in-hand teaching may be the most effective approach for a tutee to acquire new motor skills. Repetitive nature of such procedures in a group setting usually results in a high labour cost and time inefficiency. Potential solution can be utilizing robotic platforms playing the role of tutors for demonstrating and transferring the required skills. This requires an appropriate guidance scheme to integrate the tutor's motor functionalities into the robot's control architecture. For instance, for hand-in-hand supervision of the writing task, the tutor's corrections can be applied when necessary, while a very compliant motion can be achieved if no errors are detected. Inspired by this behavior, we develop a teaching interface using a dual-arm robotic platform. In our setup, one arm is connected to the tutees arm providing guidance through a variable stiffness control approach, and the other to the tutor to capture the motion and to feedback the tutees performance in a haptic manner. The reference stiffness for the tutors arm stiffness is estimated in real-time and replicated by the tutees robotic arm. Comparative experiments have been carried out on a dual-arm Baxter robot. The results imply that the human tutor is able to intuitively transfer writing skills to the tutee and also show superior learning performance over over some conventional teaching by demonstration techniques.