Motion Guides for Assisted Manipulation

This paper explores the use of passive guides to assist a human in manipulating heavy loads. A guide acts as a frictionless rail which con nes the load to a one-dimensional curve in its con guration space. In this paper we formulate the problem of designing guides to e ectively assist the human , and we apply the formulation to two types of materials handling tasks: pushing a heavy cart and single-arm reaching motions. Guides may be implemented by xed rails or programmable constraint machines. Initial experiments with humans suggest the potential bene ts of guided manipulation.