Active Physical Human-Robot Interaction: an experiment towards quantifying human interactions

Abstract

In the near future, robots may be used in environments where close contacts and interactions with humans will be inevitable, including unpredicted physical actions from the robot. However, it is still unclear how robots should execute such actionsand how humans would perceive this kind ofinteractions. In this paper, we addressactive physical human-robot interaction (active pHRI), where robots could take actions on human users without prior notifications. Ourobjective is to assess human’s perceptions regardingthese actions. Our hypothesis is that the perceptionof the users can be linked to their physical and physiological data. To verify this hypothesis, we set up an experiment in which the user uses a collaborative manipulator to play a visual game, during which the robot has a hidden task that results in a direct physical action on the user. We performed the experiment with 40 participants, of which each wasasked to fill in state-of-the-art questionnaires on personality and robot perceptions,tofind relationships with the collected physical and physiologicaldata from the participants, and robot data from sensors. The results show that participants’ perception can be related to their personalities, as well as to their physical and physiological data.

Publication
In Proceedings of the 3rd International Jc-IFToMM Symposium
pHRI Human-robot interaction Human factors Human centered robotics Coollaborative robot
Yue Hu
Assistant Professor