Planning to Minimize the Human Muscular Effort during Forceful Human-Robot Collaboration

This work addresses the problem of planning a robot configuration and grasp to position a shared object during forceful human-robot collaboration, such as a puncturing or a cutting task. Particularly, our goal is to find a robot configuration that positions the jointly manipulated object such that the muscular effort of the human, operating on the same object, is minimized while also ensuring the stability of the interaction for the robot. This raises three challenges. First, we predict the human muscular effort given a human-robot combined kinematic configuration and the interaction forces of a task. To do this, we perform task-space to muscle-space mapping for two different musculoskeletal models of the human arm. Second, we predict the human body kinematic configuration given a robot configuration and the resulting object pose in the workspace. To do this, we assume that the human prefers the body configuration that minimizes the muscular effort. And third, we ensure that, under the forces applied by the human, the robot grasp on the object is stable and the robot joint torques are within limits. Addressing these three challenges, we build a planner that, given a forceful task description, can output the robot grasp on an object and the robot configuration to position the shared object in space. We quantitatively analyze the performance of the planner and the validity of our assumptions. We conduct experiments with human subjects to measure their kinematic configurations, muscular activity, and force output during collaborative puncturing and cutting tasks. The results illustrate the effectiveness of our planner in reducing the human muscular load. For instance, for the puncturing task, our planner is able to reduce muscular load by 69.5% compared to a user-based selection of object poses.