Shared haptic perception for human-robot collaboration

To obtain a fluent human-robot collaboration, reciprocal awareness is fundamental. In this paper, we propose to achieve it by creating a haptic connection between the human operator and the collaborative robot. Data coming from a wearable skin vibration sensor are used by the robot to recognize human actions, and vibrotactile signals are used to inform the human about the correct recognition of her/his actions. It is shown that the proposed communication paradigm, based on shared haptic perception, allows to improve cycle time performance in a complex human-robot collaborative task.