Towards Partner-Aware Humanoid Robot Control Under Physical Interactions.

The topic of physical human-robot interaction received a lot of attention from the robotics community because of many promising application domains. However, studying physical interaction with a robot by an external agent, like a human or another robot, without considering the dynamics of both the systems involved leads to many short comings in fully understanding and exploiting the interaction. In this paper we present a coupled-dynamics formalism followed by a sound approach in exploiting helpful interaction with a humanoid robot. Furthermore, we present a task-based partner-aware robot control techniques. The theoretical results are validated by conducting experiments with two iCub humanoid robots involved in a physical interaction.