Low-Cost Whole-Body Touch Interaction for Manual Motion Control of a Mobile Service Robot

Mobile service robots for interaction with people need to be easily maneuverable by their users, even if physical restrictions make a manual pushing and pulling impossible. In this paper, we present a low cost approach that allows for intuitive tactile control of a mobile service robot while preserving constraints of a differential drive and obstacle avoidance. The robot's enclosure has been equipped with capacitive touch sensors able to recognize proximity of the user's hands. By simulating forces applied by the touching hands, a desired motion command for the robot is derived and combined with other motion objectives in a local motion planner (based on Dynamic Window Approach in our case). User tests showed that this haptic control is intuitively understandable and outperforms a solution using direction buttons on the robot's touch screen.

[1]  Zengxi Pan,et al.  A flexible full-body tactile sensor of low cost and minimal connections , 2003, SMC'03 Conference Proceedings. 2003 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics. Conference Theme - System Security and Assurance (Cat. No.03CH37483).

[2]  H. Worn,et al.  Resistive tactile sensor matrices using inter-electrode sampling , 2005, 31st Annual Conference of IEEE Industrial Electronics Society, 2005. IECON 2005..

[3]  Roland Siegwart,et al.  An Interpolated Dynamic Navigation Function , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[4]  Horst-Michael Groß,et al.  MIRA - middleware for robotic applications , 2012, 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[5]  Horst-Michael Groß,et al.  Progress in developing a socially assistive mobile home robot companion for the elderly with mild cognitive impairment , 2011, 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[6]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  The dynamic window approach to collision avoidance , 1997, IEEE Robotics Autom. Mag..

[7]  Fulvio Mastrogiovanni,et al.  Contact based robot control through tactile maps , 2010, 49th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC).

[8]  Erik Einhorn,et al.  Pilot - modular robot navigation for real-world applications , 2010 .

[9]  Shigeki Sugano,et al.  Whole-body covering tactile interface for human robot coordination , 2002, Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292).

[10]  Zhiwei Luo,et al.  Development of the Tactile Sensor System of a Human-Interactive Robot “RI-MAN” , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[11]  Emil M. Petriu,et al.  Tactile pattern recognition using neural networks , 1993, Proceedings of IECON '93 - 19th Annual Conference of IEEE Industrial Electronics.

[12]  Kazuhiro Kosuge,et al.  Dance partner robot - Ms DanceR , 2003, Proceedings 2003 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2003) (Cat. No.03CH37453).