Human-Centered Coordination for Robot-Assisted Equipment Transport

Abstract This work explores how to use an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) to offload the physical burdens of equipment from humans. This work formulates dynamic alignment following and compares it to position-based following techniques. We describe the control strategies of both following methods and implement them in a dynamic simulation and a physical prototype. We test the performance of the two following methods and show that dynamic alignment following can reduce robot positional error and interaction force between the human and the robot. We then analyze the energetics and the performance of the human–UGV team for candidate transportation tasks. The presence of the robot can make some tasks take longer to perform. Nonetheless, the results show that for the candidate tasks, the robot can reduce human average metabolic power and average overall task energy.