A human-like upper-limb motion planner: generating naturalistic movements for humanoid robots

• Autor(a) principal: Gulletta, Gianpaolo
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Silva, Eliana Costa e, Erlhagen, Wolfram, Meulenbroek, Ruud, Costa, Maria Fernanda Pires, Bicho, Estela
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositórios Científicos de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/1822/78133
• topic: Humanoids and human-like robotics; Human-like motion planning; Cognitive systems; Human–robot interaction; Naturalistic obstacles-avoidance; human– robot interaction; Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Eletrotécnica, Eletrónica e Informática; Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Mecânica; Science & Technology; Indústria, inovação e infraestruturas

As robots are starting to become part of our daily lives, they must be able to cooperate in a natural and efficient manner with humans to be socially accepted. Human-like morphology and motion are often considered key features for intuitive human–robot interactions because they allow human peers to easily predict the final intention of a robotic movement. Here, we present a novel motion planning algorithm, the Human-like Upper-limb Motion Planner, for the upper limb of anthropomorphic robots, that generates collision-free trajectories with human-like characteristics. Mainly inspired from established theories of human motor control, the planning process takes into account a task-dependent hierarchy of spatial and postural constraints modelled as cost functions. For experimental validation, we generate arm-hand trajectories in a series of tasks including simple point-to-point reaching movements and sequential object-manipulation paradigms. Being a major contribution to the current literature, specific focus is on the kinematics of naturalistic arm movements during the avoidance of obstacles. To evaluate human-likeness, we observe kinematic regularities and adopt smoothness measures that are applied in human motor control studies to distinguish between well-coordinated and impaired movements. The results of this study show that the proposed algorithm is capable of planning arm-hand movements with human-like kinematic features at a computational cost that allows fluent and efficient human–robot interactions.