Leader-follower impedance control for improving the social acceptance of mobile robots

MARCOS TOIBERO; FLAVIO ROBERTI; DANIEL HERRERA; RICARDO CARELLI

Vittoria

Congreso; XXI CONGRESSO BRASILEIRO DE AUTOMÁTICA (CBA2016); 2016

A complete characterization of the behavior in human-robot interactions (HRI) includes both: the behavior dynamics and the control laws that characterizes how the behavior is regulated with the perception data. In this way, this work proposes a leader-follower coordinate control based on an impedance control that allows to establish a dynamic relation between social forces and the motion error. For this, it is presented a scheme to identify the impedance based on fictitious social forces, which are described by distance-based potential fields. As part of the validation procedure, it is presented an experimental comparison to select the better of two different fictitious force structures. The criteria are determined by two qualities: least impedance errors during the validation procedure and least parameter variance during the recursive estimation procedure. Finally, with the best fictitious force and its identified impedance, it is designed an impedance control for a mobile robot Pioneer 3AT, which is programmed to follow a human in a structured scenario. According with the results, and, under the hypothesis that moving like humans will be acceptable by humans, it is believed that the proposed control improves the social acceptance of the robot for this kind of interaction.