Human-Robot Interaction and Collaboration Utilizing Voluntary Bimanual Coordination

Shouren Huang, Yongpeng Cao, Kenichi Murakami, Masatoshi Ishikawa, Yuji Yamakawa

Abstract: In daily life, we realize various complex tasks with our two upper limbs based on the so-called bimanual coordination phenomenon. A fundamental feature of bimanual coordination is the natural tendency to synchronize the motion of two upper limbs, resulting in some preferred patterns of interlimb coordination. In this study, based on the coarse-to-fine human-robot collaboration framework, we investigate the possibility of realizing human-robot interaction and collaboration for accurate manipulation utilizing voluntary bimanual coordination. The practical motivation of utilizing the voluntary bimanual coordination, which can be perceived as an indirect way of implementing interlimb transmission of force feedback information, is to avoid the bad effect on force feedback presentation due to the counterforce if the human-robot collaboration was realized in an unimanual manner. For experimental studies, we firstly evaluated the synchronous protocols in terms of in-phase and anti-phase between two arms. Based on the studied protocol, moving target tracking was then demonstrated as an application scenario of the proposed human-robot collaboration utilizing voluntary bimanual coordination.