A Balance Feedback Human Machine Interface for humanoid teleoperation in dynamic tasks

This paper introduces a novel Balance Feedback Interface (BFI) that addresses the problem of bilateral feedback for teleoperation of humanoid robots. With this new device we expect to enhance robot´s high force manipulation performance to a level comparable to humans by dynamically synchronizing master and slave. Through this Human-Machine Interface (HMI) we aim to achieve two goals: (i) have the human pilot learn from the robot´s dynamic behavior; and (ii) have the humanoid robotic platform learn from human´s motor skills. The eventual goal is to fuse the teleoperator´s commands and an autonomous controller for optimal performance. Initial results evaluate the stability of the robot while being teleoperated by a human pilot for a simple upright balancing task. During the experiment the user has no visual information about the robot´s state and is expected to compensate for unpredicted instabilities. The bilateral feedback system shows robustness to inertial variations and to external disturbances with the proposed human-in-the-loop control strategy offering valuable insight for future work.