Talk title: Human control and perception of physical interaction: Implications for human-robot systems
Abstract: Robots promise to enrich human lives, but the success of their assimilation into our society will depend on their ability to interact with humans safely and effectively. Humans and robots are highly complex, intelligent systems. Thus, learning to work collaboratively with one another is not trivial. The overall goal of my research is to advance how robots and humans learn to physically interact with one another. To this end, I will discuss our research on improving the interpretability and extracting intent from human and robot motor behavior by considering mechanical impedance. I will also demonstrate how robotic exoskeletons can use the superposition of mechanical impedances to implicitly guide and shape human behavior for rehabilitation and/or physical assistance.