Power Assist System for Carrying a Long Object with a Human

(Analysis of Human Cooperative Behavior)

Yasuo Hayashibara, Kazuo Tanie, Hirohiko Arai, and Yukinobu Sonoda

Proceedings of IFToMM Tenth World Congress on the Theory of Machines and Mechanisms, pp.1950-1955, Oulu, Finland, June 1999.

[Abstract]

We study about a power assist system for carrying a long object with a human operator. When we carry such a long object, we grasp its ends and move it cooperatively. Our purpose is to establish how to design a power assist system which achieves such a task with a human operator. The system contains a robot arm, a force sensor and a controller. In the system, since it is difficult to measure the force applied by the human operator, we can not apply the conventional power assist method [Hayashibara 1995]. On the other hand, the humans can achieve such a task based on only the forces imposed on his/her hands. Therefore, we measure and analyze the human cooperative behaviors under carrying a long object, so that we apply them to the power assist system. In this paper, we show an experimental setup for acquiring the human cooperative behaviors and discuss about how to measure and analyze them. Then, we propose a model of the human cooperative behaviors in the horizontal line.

[Keywords]

Power assist system, Human cooperative behavior