Force and Gesture-based Motion Control of Human-Robot Cooperative Lifting Using IMUs

Cooperative lifting (co-lift) is an important application of HRI with use-cases in many fields such as manufacturing, assembly, medical rehabilitation, etc. Successful industrial implementation of co-lifting requires the operations of approaching, attaching, lifting, carrying and placing the object to be handled as a whole rather than individually. In this paper, we target all stages of cooperative lifting in a holistic approach and extend previous results in [1] using IMU-based human motions estimates by introducing force-based control. We demonstrate through experiments on a UR5e robot how the force-based approach significantly improves on the position-based approach of [1]. Additionally, we improve the real-time control capabilities of the system by using a real-time data exchange communication interface. We believe that our system can be an advancing point for more human motion/gesture-based HRI applications as well as increasing the uptake of human-robot co-lifting systems in industrial settings.

I. Introduction

The field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) covers a wide range of interactions between humans and robots coexisting in the same workspace. In an industrial context, the interactions can be supportive, collaborative or cooperative [2]. If the interaction requires continuous physical contact between a robot and a human - either directly or through an object - it can be defined as a physical Human-Robot Cooperation (pHRC).