Human-robot teaming with human intent prediction and shared control

Abstract

This paper describes a set of shared control technical tools for intelligent teaming of a human operator and a robotic manipulator, and provides experimental evaluation of those tools. These technical tools can provide the human operator with an intuitive operational interface to command a multiple degree-of-freedom robotic manipulator via a general-purpose game controller and provide intelligent assistance to the human operator with human intent prediction and shared control. Two cameras with vision-feedback mounted on the robot end-effector are utilized to capture visual information and identify the location of the target object through which potential automatic control input for making adjustment to the robot motion is generated. A method to predict operator’s intent by comparing human input and automatic control input is introduced and employed to generate a probability with which the two inputs are dynamically combined to command the robot through human-machine shared control. An experimental platform consisting of a six degree-of-freedom industrial robot with a gripper and cameras is employed; results are provided with a human operator commanding the robot manipulator to execute an object inspection and handling task with the assistance of the proposed intelligent teaming algorithm.