Cooperative motion control by human and mobile manipulator

In this paper, power assistance of old people, cooperative operation with human, etc. are enabled using a mobile manipulator, and it aims at the improvement in a future life. For coexistence of robot and human being, it is required that a person can work in cooperation with robot safety. To address this issue, this paper introduces interactive virtual impedance which determines the cooperative motion between robot and human being. The external force by human added to end-effector of manipulator is given into vehicle and manipulator as force command. The equivalent mass of each system is used as an index which determines the cooperative distribution of manipulator and vehicle. By determining the impedance input of the vehicle according to equivalent mass, the virtual force input to the vehicle in consideration of the manipulability of manipulator and vehicle is synthesized. This is one of the remarkable points in the proposed strategy. The validity of the proposed method was confirmed by numerical simulation and experimental results.