The handling of flexible materials is a difficult task to fully automate due to the challenges caused by the deformability of these types of objects. Meanwhile, a fully manual process can be ergonomically challenging, tedious and inefficient. Thus, human-robot collaboration (HRC) and cooperative manipulation (co-manipulation) have received increasing interest in this field as they enable human involvement when needed while also improving productivity. To enable efficient co-manipulation and interaction between the human operator and the robot, different modalities and control methods are required. In this paper, we present and examine different control methods for co-manipulation of carbon fiber plies, evaluating the pros and cons of each method in a controlled setting. We propose that a multimodal combination of speech commands, wrist-tracking through vision, and force with compliant control would provide the best solution for complete and intuitive control of the task.

翻译：柔性材料因自身可变形特性带来的挑战，使其全自动化处理成为一项困难任务。同时，完全手工操作在人机工程学上存在挑战、过程乏味且效率低下。因此，人机协作与协同操控在该领域受到日益关注，因为该方法既能根据需要引入人类参与，又能提升生产效率。为实现操作员与机器人间高效的协同操控与交互，需要采用不同模态及控制方法。本文提出并研究了碳纤维铺层协同操控的多种控制方法，在受控环境中评估了各方法的优缺点。我们提出，结合语音指令、基于视觉的手腕追踪以及力控与柔顺控制的模态组合方案，能为实现任务的完整直觉化控制提供最佳解决方案。