Physical Human-Robot Interaction

Interaction where a person and a robot are in direct bodily contact, exchanging physical force.

Physical human-robot interaction studies situations where a person and a robot are in bodily contact and exert force on each other: a person guiding an arm by hand, a person and robot carrying something together, a person wearing an exoskeleton. It is the branch of human-robot interaction most concerned with safety. In their survey in the second edition of the Springer Handbook of Robotics (2016), Haddadin and Croft group the core issues into four areas: human safety (analyzing collision injury and relevant standards), robot design suited to interaction (lightweight, torque-controllable, able to sense contact), motion planning that accounts for the human, and interaction planning with reflexive control. Common techniques include collision detection, impedance or admittance control, joint torque sensing, and the power and force limits set out in ISO/TS 15066.

ExampleKinesthetic teaching: an operator grips the end of a collaborative arm and drags it to a target position; the robot enters a zero-force or low-impedance mode that yields to the hand's force while recording the trajectory for later playback.

Also called

pHRI, Physical HRI

Related

Human-Robot Interaction · Human-Robot Collaboration · Impedance Control · Power and Force Limiting · ISO/TS 15066 Robots and Robotic Devices — Collaborative Robots · Kinesthetic Teaching

Sources

Physical Human-Robot Interaction (Haddadin & Croft, Springer Handbook of Robotics, 2016)