Page 193 - Mechatronics for Safety, Security and Dependability in a New Era

Ch37-I044963.fm Page 177 Tuesday, August 1, 2006 3:12 PM
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3:12 PM
Ch37-I044963.fm
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HUMAN BEHAVIOR BASED OBSTACLE AVOIDANCE
FOR HUMAN-ROBOT COOPERATIVE TRANSPORTATION
Y. Aiyama', Y. Ishiwatari' and T.Seki 2
1
Department of Intelligent Interaction Technologies, University of Tsukuba,
Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-8573, Japan
Graduate School of Science and Engineering, University of Tsukuba,
Tsukuba, Tbaraki, 305-8573, Japan

ABSTRACT
Tn this paper, we propose a new method to compensate for lack of robot abilities of environment
recognition and global path planning which are very important abilities to use robots at general
environment such as homes or offices. Robots lack these abilities in unstructured environment, but
human beings have great abilities of them. We pay attention that human behavior is a result of their
recognition and path planning. Robots should use this information if it can easily sense human
motion with like as human-robot cooperation transportation task. When a robot transports an object
with a human, it senses human motion, recognize obstacles by the human behavior, and plan a local
path to follow the human with avoidance the obstacles.

KEYWORDS

Cooperative transportation, Human-robot interaction, Human interactive manipulation, Environment
recognition

INTRODUCTION

Recently, many researches aim to use mobile robots in "general environment" such as houses or offices.
In these cases, obstacle recognition and global path planning are large problem for robots. However,
human beings have very high ability for this recognition. At a glance, human can find obstacles to be
avoided. With this recognition, human can find a global path to a goal very easily. It is useful to
combine abilities of robots and human; robots do works which require force, and human does obstacle
recognition and global path planning. This combination will bring immediately a practical application
with current robot technology.

In this research, we pay attention to the information which exists in human behavior and use it for
robot to recognize obstacles and to generate its path. For this purpose, we introduce cooperative
transportation by human and robots. In this task, human and robots bring one object. So it is easy