Coordination of human and mobile manipulator formation in a perceptive reference frame

This paper presents an analysis and design method for human/robot integrated systems, especially for the coordination of human and robot formations based on a group of distributed mobile manipulators. The key for the human/robot integrated system is to create a common motion reference that can be understood by both human and the robots in the formation. First, the perceptive reference frame is introduced and the characteristics of perceptive frame are compared with time based reference frame. Next, the stability of the system based on perceptive reference frame is investigated. The applications of perceptive reference frame to multi-agents coordination in a formation, human/mobile manipulators coordination are then discussed. Based on the perceptive reference frame, the human can be naturally integrated into the robot formation. Human intelligence can therefore be integrated with the mobility and dexterous manipulation capability of the mobile manipulators to undertake complex tasks. The robot formation is therefore able to reconfigure and thus cope with unexpected events. Experiments have been used to verify the theoretical results.