Visual human-robot interaction

This paper presents a human-friendly assistant robot which allows the user to control a manipulator with his/her gaze and facial gestures. The manipulator retrieves and places objects in the environment and exchanges grasped objects with the user when the respective visual commands are issued. The user resides inside the work space of the manipulator to allow direct physical interaction between the robot and the user, for example to exchange objects. To ensure the safety of the user the manipulator is controlled with a novel control scheme which allows to guarantee quantitative limits of the potential impact force in the case of a collision. The system is implemented on a real manipulator system and experimental results of visual and physical human-robot interaction experiments are presented.