Strategies of human-robot interaction for automatic microassembly

0-7803-7736-2/03/$17.00 ©2003 IEEE Abstract : In this paper new intelligent control strategies are presented allowing a cooperative work between a human operator and a microassembly platform working in a partially structured microworld. Human integration is essential in the microworld where autonomous control alone would not be successful. The allocation of the control among human and robot occurs dynamically according to the state of the task execution. In the following, different task-level control issues (shared, traded, cooperative and priority) are discussed and tested on a micro device assembly workcell. How to minimize microeffects on every level of planning and execution system? We do not try to eliminate the uncertainties in the environment nor increases the intelligence of the microrobotic system. The main idea is to compensate the uncertain and dynamic varying micro environments by the ability, decision-making, and intervention capacities of human behavior in order to intervene in supervising and controlling with different proficiency levels. The principle consists of sharing the control of the microrobotic workcell between the operator and the remote visual controller (RVC) according to the context of action, taking advantage of their unique strengths and helping each other in their areas of weaknesses in micromanipulation. Figure 1 illustrates such human-machine interaction during on-line execution of the programmed virtual tasks developed in this work.