Page 439 - Sensing, Intelligence, Motion : How Robots and Humans Move in an Unstructured World

414 SENSITIVE SKIN—DESIGNING AN ALL-SENSITIVE ROBOT ARM MANIPULATOR

Figure 8.12 A robot dancing with a ballerina (frames from a video). At all times the
robot moves so as to be close to the ballerina while avoiding collisions with her. Note
that at times the ballerina moves while not looking at the robot. She expects the robot to
behave the same way as she would expect from a human partner—stepping in and out
as necessary and reacting in a gentle “human” way. This expectation relates to the whole
bodies of both partners. There is no preprogrammed motion on the robot part.

way the robot encountered obstacles—two students “oblivious” to the robot and
bending slightly over the chess board; it went around and above the students’
heads and continued on its trajectory.
The experiment in Figure 8.10 relates to the teleoperation setting 2 above.
The robot is controlled by an operator using a small master arm that can be
seen on the right, and also by its own motion planning algorithms. Unlike a
common teleoperation, here we have a human–machine team, where each partner
does what he/she/it is best at. The operation is thus is a real-time synergy of
human and robot intelligence. The operator would move the master arm in a
rather cavalier fashion, without regard for a human inside the robot workspace
and without attempting a precise trajectory. The goal here was for the main
(slave) robot to reach the right side of the scene and into the large loop. The
operator quickly moves the master arm ahead of the robot, paying no attention to
the human “obstacle” in the scene. When encountering the previously unknown
obstacle—a person playing chess—the robot goes around the player’s head;
lowers slightly, trying to get to the operator’s path; and then continues on the
operator-dictated path.
The pictures in Figure 8.11 also relate to the teleoperation setting 2. Along
the way the operator attempts to make the robot “hit” the human present in the
robot workspace. This scene surely looks more dramatic in a videotape: The
viewer sees that the operator, after first bringing the robot right above the human
head, decisively pushes the master arm straight down; the viewer also sees how,
after starting in this direction, the robot freezes in the air, “refusing” to hurt the