### Abstract

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.

### Bibtex reference

@inproceedings{Evrard09Hum,
author = "P. Evrard and E. Gribovskaya and S. Calinon and A. Billard and A. Kheddar",
title = "Teaching physical collaborative tasks:
Object-lifting case study with a humanoid",
booktitle = "Proc. {IEEE-RAS} Intl Conf. on Humanoid Robots ({H}umanoids)",
year = "2009",
month="December",
location="Paris, France",
pages="399--404"
}

### Video

Learning of a collaborative manipulation skill with HRP-2 by showing multiple demonstrations of the skill in slightly different situations (different initial position and orientation of the object). The robot is standing in an half-sitting posture during the experiment, where the 7 DOFs of the right arm and torso are used in the experiment. A built-in stereoscopic vision is used to track colored patches, and a 6-axes force sensor at the level of the right wrist is used to track the interaction forces with the environment during task execution. The robot is teleoperated through a Phantom Desktop haptic device from Sensable Technologies. An impedance controller is used to control the robot.
This work is in collaboration with the Joint Japanese-French Robotics Laboratory (JRL) at AIST, Tsukuba, Japan.