Research on Intelligent Control System for Robots Assisting Humans

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Our society is rapidly aging. More than 25% of Japanese population is expected to be composed of people older than 65 years old. Other countries such as German and France will eventually encounter similar, if the situations of the countries do not change. In the aging society, more and more elder people will be required to continue to work to support themselves. Robots or advanced mechanical systems, which support elder people to do their tasks or their daily life, have to be developed for the coming aging society.The project was a three years' project carried out from April 1996 through March 1999 and aimed to study an intelligent control system for robots assisting humans. Especially, we considered a fundamental problem of the controller design of robots handling a single object in coordination with humans.The research results are classified into three parts. During the first year of the project, we had discussed a fundamental controller design problem for robots handling an object i … More n cooperation with a human. That is, how to generate or initiate robot motion for cooperative handling of an object with a human without causing instability problem had been considered.Several control schemes for this problem had been proposed as candidates of the control strategies. We had done a comparative study of promising control schemes among them using an industrial robot with six degrees of freedom. Main result is included in Part I of this report.What kind of cooperation is possible between robots and humans other than handling of a heavy object had been discussed during the second year of the project. Other types of cooperation had been shown possible by utilizing the redundancy of multiple robots in coordination. As an example, handling of a flexible object by two robots in cooperation with a human was realized to show the concept.In this system, we encounter two problems. One is a problem of noises from force sensors attached to the wrist of each manipulator. The other is a problem relating to the misalignment of the coordinate system of each robot. The main results of the research is included in Part II of this report. The misalignment problem of coordinate systems are omitted in this report. Refer to the reference [1] in Part IV for this problem.During the third year of the project, we developed a mobile dual-manipulator system for human-robot collaboration, The development of the mobile dual- manipulator system had been partially supported by OMRON Corporation. The system consists of a omni-directional mobile base, a body attached to the mobile base, and two seven-degrees-of-freedom manipulators attached to the body. Less