Collaborative manipulation task often requires negotiation using explicit or implicit communication. An important example is determining where to move when the goal destination is not uniquely specified, and who should lead the motion. This work is motivated by the ability of humans to communicate the desired destination of motion through back-and-forth force exchanges. Inherent to these exchanges is also the ability to dynamically assign a role to each participant, either taking the initiative or deferring to the partner's lead. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical robot control framework that emulates human behavior in communicating a motion destination to a human collaborator and in responding to their actions. At the top level, the controller consists of a set of finite-state machines corresponding to different levels of commitment of the robot to its desired goal configuration. The control architecture is loosely based on the human strategy observed in the human-human experiments, and the key component is a real-time intent recognizer that helps the robot respond to human actions. We describe the details of the control framework, and feature engineering and training process of the intent recognition. The proposed controller was implemented on a UR10e robot (Universal Robots) and evaluated through human studies. The experiments show that the robot correctly recognizes and responds to human input, communicates its intent clearly, and resolves conflict. We report success rates and draw comparisons with human-human experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.

翻译：协作操作任务通常需要通过显式或隐式沟通进行协商。一个重要的例子是当目标位置未唯一指定时，如何确定移动方向以及由谁主导运动。本研究的灵感来源于人类通过来回作用力传递来沟通期望运动目标的能力。这种力传递过程还天然包含动态分配每个参与者角色（主动主导或跟随同伴引导）的能力。本文提出了一种分层机器人控制框架，该框架模拟人类在向协作伙伴传达运动目标并响应其动作时的行为。在顶层控制中，控制器由一组对应机器人对其期望目标构型不同承诺程度的有限状态机组成。该控制架构 loosely 基于人类-人类实验中观察到的策略，其核心组件是一个能帮助机器人实时识别并回应用户动作的意图识别器。我们详细描述了控制框架的构成，以及意图识别模块的特征工程与训练流程。所提出的控制器已在UR10e机器人（Universal Robots）上实现，并通过人类研究进行了评估。实验表明，该机器人能准确识别并响应人类输入、清晰传达自身意图并有效化解冲突。我们报告了任务成功率，并与人类-人类实验进行对比，以证明该方法的有效性。