Integration of heterogeneity for human-friendly robotic operations

The objective of this paper is to develop an analytical scheme to integrate the heterogeneity of human and robot functions to achieve a human-friendly robotic operations. The heterogeneity of human and robot functions can be characterized by the fact that humans are intelligent while robots are fast, powerful and accurate. Humans can use their knowledge and experience to quickly respond to unexpected events, which makes it easy for humans to deal with unstructured environments. In contrast, robots can easily enhance the mechanical power of humans and the ability of humans to work remotely. Therefore, robots are capable of performing precise and repetitive tasks at high speed or in a hazardous environment. The important issue, in light of human/robot heterogeneity, is how to plan and control a robotic operation such that the human and the robot can cooperate in a complementary manner. Thus, a task which cannot be done by either human or robot alone can be performed efficiently and robustly by both. This paper introduces a new paradigm for human/robot interactive systems, heterogeneous function-based human/robot cooperation. A new perceptive action reference frame has been developed in the paper. It matches human perception and robot sensory measurement, and provides a platform for modeling the human/robot cooperative operations. The theoretical results presented in the paper have laid down a foundation for stability analysis as well as a planning and control system design of human/robot integrated systems. The implementations and experimental results have clearly demonstrated the advantages of proposed methods.