ACTICIPATE addressed the design of the robot’s behaviour that will share workspaces and co-work with humans in the future. The behaviour modelling relied on human experiments to learn the important cues in dyadic human-human interaction. It allowed us to develop a behaviour model that controls humanoid robot upper body motion in dynamic environments, during reaching and manipulation tasks, and at the same time to understand, predict and anticipate the actions of a human co-worker, as needed in manufacturing, assistive and service robotics, and domestic applications.
The dyadic interaction scenarios call for the following capabilities that are tackled in ACTICIPATE: (i) a motion generation mechanism to allow the robot to perform legible movements easily understandable to human (ii) a framework to coordinate movements of head, eyes and arm in a way similar to human movements, and model the action/movement coupling between co-workers in dyadic interaction tasks. (iii) the ability to understand and anticipate human actions, based on a common motor system/model.
There are numerous reasons for the development of such robots, and equally numerous capabilities that future robots yet need to acquire before cohabitation with humans becomes a reality. Among many, human-like nonverbal interpersonal interaction model holds the great potential to pave the way to successful utilization of the robot co-workers in a dynamic manufacturing environment. Interaction model has two-fold utilization. It is used to decode the observed motions of the others and at the same time to plan the robot’s actions and coordinate the motion execution of eyes, head and arms.
