A comprehensive exploration of the control schemes of human-robot interactions In Human-Robot Interaction Control Using Reinforcement Learning, an expert team of authors delivers a concise overview of human-robot interaction control schemes and insightful presentations of novel, model-free and reinforcement learning controllers. The book begins with a brief introduction to state-of-the-art human-robot interaction control and reinforcement learning before moving on to describe the typical environment model. The authors also describe some of the most famous identification techniques for parameter estimation. Human-Robot Interaction Control Using Reinforcement Learning offers rigorous mathematical treatments and demonstrations that facilitate the understanding of control schemes and algorithms. It also describes stability and convergence analysis of human-robot interaction control and reinforcement learning based control. The authors also discuss advanced and cutting-edge topics, like inverse and velocity kinematics solutions, H2 neural control, and likely upcoming developments in the field of robotics. Readers will also enjoy: A thorough introduction to model-based human-robot interaction control Comprehensive explorations of model-free human-robot interaction control and human-in-the-loop control using Euler angles Practical discussions of reinforcement learning for robot position and force control, as well as continuous time reinforcement learning for robot force control In-depth examinations of robot control in worst-case uncertainty using reinforcement learning and the control of redundant robots using multi-agent reinforcement learning Perfect for senior undergraduate and graduate students, academic researchers, and industrial practitioners studying and working in the fields of robotics, learning control systems, neural networks, and computational intelligence, Human-Robot Interaction Control Using Reinforcement Learning is also an indispensable resource for students and professionals studying reinforcement learning.

Methods by which robots can learn control laws that enable real-time reactivity using dynamical systems; with applications and exercises. This book presents a wealth of machine learning techniques to make the control of robots more flexible and safe when interacting with humans. It introduces a set of control laws that enable reactivity using dynamical systems, a widely used method for solving motion-planning problems in robotics. These control approaches can replan in milliseconds to adapt to new environmental constraints and offer safe and compliant control of forces in contact. The techniques offer theoretical advantages, including convergence to a goal, non-penetration of obstacles, and passivity. The coverage of learning begins with low-level control parameters and progresses to higher-level competencies composed of combinations of skills. Learning for Adaptive and Reactive Robot Control is designed for graduate-level courses in robotics, with chapters that proceed from fundamentals to more advanced content. Techniques covered include learning from demonstration, optimization, and reinforcement learning, and using dynamical systems in learning control laws, trajectory planning, and methods for compliant and force control . Features for teaching in each chapter: applications, which range from arm manipulators to whole-body control of humanoid robots; pencil-and-paper and programming exercises; lecture videos, slides, and MATLAB code examples available on the author’s website . an eTextbook platform website offering protected material[EPS2] for instructors including solutions.

This book provides an overview of recent research developments in the automation and control of robotic systems that collaborate with humans. A measure of human collaboration being necessary for the optimal operation of any robotic system, the contributors exploit a broad selection of such systems to demonstrate the importance of the subject, particularly where the environment is prone to uncertainty or complexity. They show how such human strengths as high-level decision-making, flexibility, and dexterity can be combined with robotic precision, and ability to perform task repetitively or in a dangerous environment. The book focuses on quantitative methods and control design for guaranteed robot performance and balanced human experience from both physical human-robot interaction and social human-robot interaction. Its contributions develop and expand upon material presented at various international conferences. They are organized into three parts covering: one-human–one-robot collaboration; one-human–multiple-robot collaboration; and human–swarm collaboration. Individual topic areas include resource optimization (human and robotic), safety in collaboration, human trust in robot and decision-making when collaborating with robots, abstraction of swarm systems to make them suitable for human control, modeling and control of internal force interactions for collaborative manipulation, and the sharing of control between human and automated systems, etc. Control and decision-making algorithms feature prominently in the text, importantly within the context of human factors and the constraints they impose. Applications such as assistive technology, driverless vehicles, cooperative mobile robots, manufacturing robots and swarm robots are considered. Illustrative figures and tables are provided throughout the book. Researchers and students working in controls, and the interaction of humans and robots will learn new methods for human–robot collaboration from this book and will find the cutting edge of the subject described in depth.

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) explores techniques for learning a task policy from examples provided by a human teacher. The field of LfD has grown into an extensive body of literature over the past 30 years, with a wide variety of approaches for encoding human demonstrations and modeling skills and tasks. Additionally, we have recently seen a focus on gathering data from non-expert human teachers (i.e., domain experts but not robotics experts). In this book, we provide an introduction to the field with a focus on the unique technical challenges associated with designing robots that learn from naive human teachers. We begin, in the introduction, with a unification of the various terminology seen in the literature as well as an outline of the design choices one has in designing an LfD system. Chapter 2 gives a brief survey of the psychology literature that provides insights from human social learning that are relevant to designing robotic social learners. Chapter 3 walks through an LfD interaction, surveying the design choices one makes and state of the art approaches in prior work. First, is the choice of input, how the human teacher interacts with the robot to provide demonstrations. Next, is the choice of modeling technique. Currently, there is a dichotomy in the field between approaches that model low-level motor skills and those that model high-level tasks composed of primitive actions. We devote a chapter to each of these. Chapter 7 is devoted to interactive and active learning approaches that allow the robot to refine an existing task model. And finally, Chapter 8 provides best practices for evaluation of LfD systems, with a focus on how to approach experiments with human subjects in this domain.

Computational Human-Robot Interaction provides the reader with a systematic overview of the field of Human-Robot Interaction over the past decade, with a focus on the computational frameworks, algorithms, techniques, and models currently used to enable robots to interact with humans.

In recent years, researchers have achieved great success in guaranteeing safety in human-robot interaction, yielding a new generation of robots that can work with humans in close proximity, known as collaborative robots (cobots). However, due to the lack of ability to understand and coordinate with their human partners, the ``co'' in most cobots still refers to ``coexistence'' rather than ``collaboration''. This thesis aims to develop an adaptive learning and control framework with a novel physical and data-driven approach towards a real collaborative robot. The first part focuses on online human motion prediction. A comprehensive study on various motion prediction techniques is presented, including their scope of application, accuracy in different time scales, and implementation complexity. Based on this study, a hybrid approach that combines physically well-understood models with data-driven learning techniques is proposed and validated through a motion data set. The second part addresses interaction control in human-robot collaboration. An adaptive impedance control scheme with human reference estimation is presented. Reinforcement learning is used to find optimal control parameters to minimize a task-orient cost function without fully knowing the system dynamic. The proposed framework is experimentally validated through two benchmark applications for human-robot collaboration: object handover and cooperative object handling. Results show that the robot can provide reliable online human motion prediction, react early to human motion variation, make proactive contributions to physical collaborations, and behave compliantly in response to human forces.