With robots entering everyday life, cooperative tasks involving physical human robot interaction gain in importance. Besides object transfer through pure point to-point movement trajectories, humans also often apply repetitive swing movements that enable incremental energy injection when manipulating bulky and heavy
objects. In our work, we split flexible object swinging into two extremes: an oscillating entity formed by the partners' arms and a rigid object and a pendulum-like object that can oscillate itself.
The video shows a part of our work on cooperative swinging of pendulum-like objects. An energy based control concept is developed, which enables a robot to cooperate with a human in a goal-directed swing-up task. We conducted virtual reality experiments to compare effort sharing and performance of mixed human-human and human-robot dyads. In particular, in this video a human leader interacts with a simulated robot follower. Whereas the leader knows the desired pendulum energy, i.e. sees a goal sphere, the robot follower does not know the desired pendulum energy and has to infer the human intention from the interaction in order to contribute to the task.
