Intuitive Physical Human Robot Interaction and Interfaces

The use robotics in medicine inherently involves physical interaction between patients, caregivers, and robots in all combinations. Developing intuitive physical interfaces between humans and robots require all the classic elements of a robotic system: perception, action and sensing. A great variety of sensing and perception tasks are required, including recording the forces and motions of a surgeon to their intent, determining the mechanical parameters of human tissue, and estimation the force between rehabilitation robot and a moving stroke patient. The reciprocal nature of interaction means that the robot will also need to provide useful feedback to the human operator, whether that person is a patient or a caregiver. We need to consider systems that involve many human senses, the most common of which are vision, sound and haptic (tactile and force).

A major reason why system involving physical collaboration between humans and robots are so difficult to design well is that, from the perspective a robot, humans are uncertain extremely. Unlike a passive, humans change their motion, static environment, strength and immediate purpose on a regular basis. This can be as simple as physiologic movement, or as complex as the motions of a surgeon suturing during surgery. The human is an integral part of a closed loop feedback system during physical interaction with a robot, simultaneously exchanging energy and information with the robotic system, and can not be thought simply of as an external input system.

The loop is often closed with both visual feed back and human force, each with its own delays and errors, this can potentially cause instabilities in the human robot system. There are several approaches to solving these problems, which can be used parallel: modeling the human with as much detail as possible, sensing the human’s physical behavior in a very large number of dimensions, and developing robot behaviors that will ensure appropriate interaction no matter what the human does.

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