Human-Robot Role Arbitration via Differential Game Theory

The industry needs controllers that allow smooth and natural physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI) to make production scenarios more flexible and user-friendly. Within this context, particularly interesting is Role Arbitration, which is the mechanism that assigns the role of the leader to either the human or the robot. This paper investigates Game-Theory (GT) to model pHRI, and specifically, Cooperative Game Theory (CGT) and Non-Cooperative Game Theory (NCGT) are considered. This work proposes a possible solution to the Role Arbitration problem and defines a Role Arbitration framework based on differential game theory to allow pHRI. The proposed method can allow trajectory deformation according to human will, avoiding reaching dangerous situations such as collisions with environmental features, robot joints and workspace limits, and possibly safety constraints. Three sets of experiments are proposed to evaluate different situations and compared with two other standard methods for pHRI, the Impedance Control, and the Manual Guidance. Experiments show that with our Role Arbitration method, different situations can be handled safely and smoothly with a low human effort. In particular, the performances of the IMP and MG vary according to the task. In some cases, MG performs well, and IMP does not. In some others, IMP performs excellently, and MG does not. The proposed Role Arbitration controller performs well in all the cases, showing its superiority and generality. The proposed method generally requires less force and ensures better accuracy in performing all tasks than standard controllers.