Bilateral Haptic Collaboration for Human-Robot Cooperative Tasks

The aim of this letter is to introduce the concept of bilateral haptic cooperation as a novel paradigm for human-robot cooperative tasks. The approach is demonstrated with a system composed of a soft gripper and a wearable interface. The soft gripper, called CoGripper, has been designed to guarantee a safe interaction giving the possibility to the operator to reconfigure the device according to the object to be grasped. The wearable interface is used to control the open/close motion of the gripper and to feedback information about important task parameters, e.g., the grasp tightness. The result is a bilateral haptic collaboration where human and robot bidirectionally communicate through the interface. The user interaction with the system is extremely intuitive and simple. We performed three user studies to prove the effectiveness of bilateral haptic collaboration involving ten subjects. Results confirmed that the use of the wearable interface reduces the time to accomplish a cooperative task and enables a better control of the grasp tightness.