Robots must move legibly around people for safety reasons, especially for tasks where physical contact is possible. One such task is handovers, which requires implicit communication on where and when physical contact (object transfer) occurs. In this work, we study whether the trajectory model used by a robot during the reaching phase affects the subjective perceptions of receivers for robot-to-human handovers. We conducted a user study where 32 participants were handed over three objects with four trajectory models: three were versions of a minimum jerk trajectory, and one was an ellipse-fitting-based trajectory. The start position of the handover was fixed for all trajectories, and the end position was allowed to vary randomly around a fixed position by $\pm$3 cm in all axis. The user study found no significant differences among the handover trajectories in survey questions relating to safety, predictability, naturalness, and other subjective metrics. While these results seemingly reject the hypothesis that the trajectory affects human perceptions of a handover, it prompts future research to investigate the effect of other variables, such as robot speed, object transfer position, object orientation at the transfer point, and explicit communication signals such as gaze and speech.
翻译:机器人必须出于安全考虑, 特别是在可能进行物理接触的任务中。 任务之一是交接, 需要就何时何地进行暗中通信( 物体转移) 。 在这项工作中, 我们研究机器人在到达阶段使用的轨迹模型是否影响机器人向人类交接接收器的主观感觉。 我们进行了一项用户研究, 32名参与者以四种轨迹模型移交了3个对象: 3个是最低性能轨迹的版本, 1个是一个基于椭圆的轨迹。 交接的起始位置是为所有轨道固定的, 最终位置允许在所有轴线固定位置上随机变化 $\ pm3 cm 。 用户研究发现, 在与安全、 可预测性、 自然性 和其他主观指标有关的调查问题中, 移交轨道之间没有重大差异。 虽然这些结果似乎否定了轨迹影响人类交接感的假设, 但也促使未来研究调查其他变量的影响, 如机器人速度、 对象转移位置、 对象方向在所有轴轴轴中随机变化的位置, 以及清晰的语音等 信号 。