Human-Robot Collaborative Transportation via Distance-based Role Allocation for Precise Positioning of Flexible Materials

Despite the importance of human-robot collaborative transportation of flexible material in many industrial scenarios, many works in the literature assume a passive role for the robot during the collaboration. The robot can only follow the human partner, without providing assistance in the more challenging phase of the collaboration such as precise material positioning. This work presents a framework for co-transportation, proposing a distance-based policy for dynamic leader role allocation through the task. For large distances from the target pose, the robot is mainly controlled by vision-based manual guidance exploiting haptic feedback and 3D human pose information; instead, close to the target material position, the robot acts as a leader guiding the human operator. The proposed framework is evaluated considering a carbon fiber draping task, which requires both co-transportation and precise positioning of flexible materials. Experimental results demonstrate how the robot leading the ...