text: Human teams can be exceptionally efficient at adapting and collaborating during manipulation tasks using shared mental models. However, the same shared mental models that can be used by humans to perform robust low-level force and motion control during collaborative manipulation tasks are non-existent for robots. For robots to perform collaborative tasks with people naturally and efficiently, understanding and predicting human intent is necessary. However, humans are difficult to predict and model. We have completed an exploratory study recording motion and force for 20 human dyads moving an object in tandem in order to better understand how they move and how their movement can be predicted. In this paper, we show how past motion data can be used to predict human intent. In order to predict human intent, which we equate with the human team's velocity for a short time horizon, we used a neural network. Using the previous 150 time steps at a rate of 200 Hz, human intent can be predicted for the next 50 time steps with a mean squared error of 0.02 (m s)^2. We also show that human intent can be estimated in a human-robot dyad. This work is an important first step in enabling future work of integrating human intent estimation on a robot controller to execute a short-term collaborative trajectory.
  @cite_8: This paper presents the application of a statistical framework that allows to endow a humanoid robot with the ability to perform a collaborative manipulation task with a human operator. We investigate to what extent the dynamics of the motion and the haptic communication process that takes place during physical collaborative tasks can be encapsulated by the probabilistic model. This framework encodes the dataset in a Gaussian Mixture Model, which components represent the local correlations across the variables that characterize the task. A set of demonstrations is performed using a bilateral coupling teleoperation setup; then the statistical model is trained in a pure follower leader role distribution mode between the human and robot alternatively. The task is reproduced using Gaussian Mixture Regression. We present the probabilistic model and the experimental results obtained on the humanoid platform HRP-2; preliminary results assess our theory on switching behavior modes in dyad collaborative tasks: when reproduced with users which were not instructed to behave in either a follower or a leader mode, the robot switched automatically between the learned leader and follower behaviors.
summary: The minimum jerk model is one example of an invariant model, where by finding a model for a task, the dynamics can be simplified. Many models for a controller for cooperative manipulation only have a few changing parameters that include initial and final time and position. They may also include a maximum velocity or other parameter. With just a few parameters, the entire trajectory can be described. One approach to determining these models has been programming by demonstration @cite_8 .