Disagreement-Aware Variable Impedance Control for Online Learning of Physical Human-Robot Cooperation Tasks

In order to make the coexistence between humans and robots a reality, we must understand how they may cooperate more effectively. Modern robots, empowered with reliable controls and advanced machine learning reasoning can face this challenge. In this article, we presented a Disagreement- Aware Variable Impedance (DAVI) Controller, where the robot stiffness is regulated as a function of the perceived disagreement with the human cooperator. We tested the algorithm on a 7 DoF Franka Emika Panda robot performing the learning of a pick&place task with continuous adaptation of the goal location and the via-points with human interactive corrections, triggered by our proposed approach. A validation study was conducted with 5 users in order to understand the reliability of the method.