A fundamental approach of avoidance planning of robots considering human emotions

Abstract

In the planning of robots, the avoidance of humans working in the same work space, considering human emotions, was examined experimentally. We adopt the control law that the robot's evasive motion should follow the motion of an approaching human hand at a constant interval (referred to as the following distance). First, the relationship between human emotions and the motion parameters of robots (that is, the following distance and velocity of motion in the task direction) were experimentally clarified first using the rating scale method. The results show that appropriate combinations of motion parameters exist, and that the emotion "Pleasant" was representative of the emotions. Second, the control law of the robot's avoidance motion, in which the following distance is adjusted based on fuzzy inference with respect to the emotion "Pleasant", was proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed method was experimentally confirmed using an existing two-degree-of-freedom robot.