Construction of human-robot cooperating system based on structure/motion model

The purpose of this study is constructing a unified methodology which could deal with many control problems existing in human-robot cooperating systems such as self-collision, collisions with obstacles, singular configurations and so on. To construct such methodology, we could realize safe and highly maneuverable human-robot cooperation as well as human-human cooperation. For this purpose, we propose a concept of "Structure/Motion Models" which represents the structures and their motions of robots, objects in the environment and the partner for the cooperation (humans). In this paper, we explain "RoBE (Representation of Body by Elastic elements)", one of the modeling methods to construct structure/motion models. Constructing the models by using RoBE, we could deal with the problems of self-collisions and collisions with obstacles with a unified approach. We explain how to solve these control problems as the examples of solving some problems during the human-robot cooperation by using the structure-motion models, and results of these examples illustrate the validity of the concept of the structure/motion model.