Bioinspiration in Affective Motion Planning of an Anthropomorphic Robot for Affect-Based Human-Robot Collaborative Manufacturing

Affect-based robot-human communication is a nonverbal communication method that can help the robot communicate its mental states to the collaborating human during human-robot collaborative manufacturing. Such communication can make the manufacturing situations (events) transparent to the human and also impact the cognitive abilities of the human. All these may impact the overall manufacturing performance positively. In this paper, an anthropomorphic robot with affect display ability is used to collaborate with its human partner so that they can collaboratively assemble several parts to manufacture a finished product. Firstly, in order to receive bioinspiration, the affective features in a similar human-human collaborative assembly task arc investigated. Secondly, based on the human's affective features, the affect dynamics (the computational model of affect) for the robot is derived for the collaborative assembly task. Thirdly, based on the affect model, an affect-based intelligent motion planning strategy for the robot is developed so that the robot can dynamically adjust its affective states like a human with changes in the assembly task situations during the human-robot collaborative assembly task to make the assembly situations transparent to the human. Finally, the potential impacts of the proposed bio-inspired dynamic affect-based robot motion planning on human-robot interaction and manufacturing performance are discussed.