In this paper we offer an intelligent integrated environment for human-robot interaction. This environment takes advantage of the fact that robots are both digital and physical entities, thus improving human-robot interaction and communication. Using mixed reality, our approach brings digital information directly into the physical environment, allowing users to interact with robots’ ideas and t...

The social robot Probo was designed to study human-robot interaction and robot-assisted therapy for children, and is currently used as facilitator for autism therapies. This paper discusses the design aspects, providing an intuitive, social, but also safe and soft physical behavior. For an intuitive interaction, the robot is equipped with 19 degrees of freedom, enabling it to show facial expres...

Human-robot interaction can be divided into two categories based on the physical distance between the human and robot: remote and proximal. In proximal interaction, the human and robot often engage in close coordination; in remote interaction, the human and robot are less coupled due to communication constraints. As a result, providing automation for the robot in remote interaction becomes more...

Physical human–robot interaction and cooperation has become a topic of increasing importance and of major focus in robotics research. An essential requirement of a robot designed for high mobility and direct interaction with human users or uncertain environments is that it must in no case pose a threat to the human. Until recently, quite a few attempts were made to investigate real-world threat...

A large literature describes the use of robots’ physical bodies to support communication with people. Touch is a natural channel for physical interaction, yet it is not understood how principles of interpersonal touch might carry over to human-robot interaction. Ten students participated in an interactive anatomy lesson with a small, humanoid robot. Participants either touched or pointed to an ...

Waltz is a typical example of physical human-human interaction (pHHI) in a well-structured environment, which makes waltz a good start point for understanding pHHI and physical human-robot interaction (pHRI). Waltz involves two dancers. Understanding of the female dancer’s abilities in dancing may help designing robots that can physically interact with human in intuitive ways. Therefore, our go...

An important aspect of pHRI (physical Human Robot Interaction) is to assure the safety of the human participant in the interaction. One of the approaches to assure safety is to plan the paths executed by the robot based on a certain safety criterion. This acts as a constraint for decision making of intelligent systems. This paper introduces the FaultTolerant Distance as a novel safety criterion...