An understanding of how two people anticipate, adapt, and react to each other's forces and motions could aid in designing machines to work cooperatively with humans and further explain how a single human interacts with the world. Tasks, such as lifting and moving a bulky object, teaching manual skills, dancing, and handing off a baton or a drinking glass, involve haptic interaction, which is a communication channel distinct from spoken language and gestures, but much less studied. Throughout this thesis, I will discuss my experiments on physical interaction and negotiation between two agents working on a target acquisition task. First, I will evaluate human-human physical interaction. I will show that dyads are faster than individuals, despite applying larger forces. By analyzing the interaction forces through a jointly controlled object, I will reveal a distinctly different completion strategy for dyads that is not available for individuals. Second, I will look at human-robot interaction. By simulating human-human interaction, a robot can surreptitiously replace one of the human partners leading to improved disturbance rejection.

Last modified

• 05/28/2018

Creator

• Kyle Brandon Reed

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2JT5N

Subject

• Mechanical Engineering

Keyword

• physical cooperation
• interaction
• human-human
• human-robot

Date created

• 2007-05-10

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright