Admittance control for collaborative dual-arm manipulation

Human-robot collaboration is an appealing solution to increase the flexibility of production lines. In this context, we propose a kinematic control strategy for dual-arm robotic platforms physically collaborating with human operators. Based on admittance control, our approach aims at improving the performance of object transportation tasks by acting on two levels: estimating and compensating gravity effects on one side, and considering human intention in the cooperative task space on the other. An experimental study using virtual reality reveals the effectiveness of our method in terms of reduced human energy expenditure.