Comfortable robot to human object hand-over

Abstract

A method for robot to human object hand-over is presented that takes into account user comfort. Comfort is addressed by serving the object to facilitate user's convenience. The object is delivered so that the most appropriate part is oriented towards the person interacting with the robot. This approach, aimed at contributing to the development of socially aware robots, has not been considered in previous works. The robot system also supports sensory-motor skills like object and people detection, robot grasping and motion planning. The experimental setup consists of a six degrees of freedom robot arm with both an eye-in-hand laser scanner and a fixed range sensor. The user interacting with the robot can assume an arbitrary position in front of the robot. Experiments are reported from a user study. © 2012 IEEE.