Motor interference of elbow configuration changes in human-robot interaction

Abstract Motor interference is an effect of movement deviations resulting from activation of mirror neurons due to a counterpart’s movements. This paper presents results from a study investigating the impact of elbow configuration changes of a physical robot arm on human elbow configurations, while performing a linear hand movement task. A within-subjects design is chosen with different elbow configuration change conditions (upwards, downwards, no change) presented to the participants. Results show various types of imitation behavior of elbow movements by the participants. Significant differences of the variability of height differences of optically tracked wrist and elbow positions measured by standard deviations of the time series of height difference progressions are found compared to a baseline condition without elbow movements. These results show, that recently found principles in human-human-interaction do also apply to human-robot interaction, where involuntary arm configuration changes induced by a robotic counterpart may lead to unwanted sensitivity and manipulability variations, which could interfere with given interaction tasks.