Humans often work closely together and relay a wealth of information through physical interaction. Robots, on the other hand, have not yet been developed to work similarly closely with humans, and to effectively convey information when engaging in physical human-robot interaction (pHRI). This currently limits the potential of physical human-robot collaboration to solve real-world problems. This paper investigates the question of how to establish clear and intuitive robot-to-human communication, while ensuring human comfort during pHRI. We approach this question from the perspective of a leader-follower scenario, in which a full-body humanoid robot leads a slow waltz dance by signaling the next steps to a human partner. This is achieved through the development of a whole-body control framework combining admittance and impedance control, which allows for different communication modalities including haptic, visual, and audio signals. Participant experiments allowed to validate the performance of the controller, and to understand what types of communication work better in terms of effectiveness and comfort during robot-led pHRI.

翻译：人类常常紧密协作，并通过物理交互传递大量信息。相比之下，机器人尚未发展到能与人类类似地密切合作，并在物理人机交互（pHRI）中有效传递信息。这目前限制了物理人机协作解决现实世界问题的潜力。本文研究了如何在确保pHRI过程中人类舒适度的同时，建立清晰直观的机器人向人类通信。我们从领导者-跟随者场景的角度探讨这一问题，其中全身人形机器人通过向人类舞伴示意下一步动作来引导慢华尔兹舞蹈。这是通过开发一种结合导纳控制和阻抗控制的全身体控制框架实现的，该框架允许包括触觉、视觉和音频信号在内的不同通信模态。参与者实验验证了控制器的性能，并理解了在机器人引导的pHRI中，哪些类型的通信在效果和舒适度方面表现更佳。