Browsing by Author "Masone, Carlo"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1

Open Access
Planning and control for robotic tasks with a human-in-the-loop
(2014) Masone, Carlo; Allgöwer, Frank (Prof. Dr.-Ing.)
The design of robotic tasks with a joint interaction with a human user (human-in-the-loop) is currently a highly popular topic in robotics research. One of the main reasons of interest is the possibility of combining the skills of both humans and robots to successfully perform complex tasks. In particular: - Robots are extremely capable at autonomously executing specific and repetitive tasks, with great speed and precision, and they can operate in environments that are dangerous for a human operator. - With respect to robots, humans possess far superior cognitive capabilities and world awareness which allow them to tackle applications that involve unstructured environments or require taking difficult and quick decisions. The co-participation of humans and robots to a task can also arise from other reasons, such as an implicit constraint of the task itself (wearable robots, motion simulators) or safety regulations that require a human to supervise the activity of robotic workers. In view of these considerations, shared control (between human and robot) is a promising (and, in some fields, consolidated) approach to address a number of robotics applications. However, there are several open questions and challenges regarding the design of shared control architectures, such as choosing the role of the human in the task, devising suitable command interfaces and feedback algorithms that increase the situation awareness of the operator, and coping with the unpredictable signals or decisions from the human user. In this doctoral thesis it is presented a study of some novel robotic tasks involving human-robot interaction. The original shared control architectures developed for these tasks illustrate several novel solutions to the aforementioned questions. Furthermore, the tasks considered in the thesis span various possibilities for the typical characteristics of shared control architectures in robotics, i.e.: - the role of the human operator in the shared task and his/her interaction with the robot(s); - the typology and number of robots that participate to the shared task; - the feedback returned to the human operator.