An Energy-Based Control Architecture for Shared Autonomy

• Published in: IEEE transactions on robotics 2022-12, Vol.38 (6), p.3917-3935
• Main Authors: Benzi, Federico, Ferraguti, Federica, Riggio, Giuseppe, Secchi, Cristian
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Autonomy; Behavioral sciences; Collaboration; Control systems; Couplings; Formal method; Human computer interaction; Human-centered robotics; Machine learning; Multi-robot systems; Multiple robots; multirobot systems; Optimization; optimization and optimal control; physical human–robot interaction; Robot control; Robotics; Task analysis
• ISSN: 1552-3098; 1941-0468
• DOI: 10.1109/TRO.2022.3180885

In robotic applications where the autonomy is shared between the human and the robot, the autonomous behavior of the robotic system is determined considering mainly the task to be executed and the data collected from the environment using, e.g., formal methods and machine learning techniques. Nevertheless, it is important to correctly translate high-level decision into low-level control inputs in order to avoid an unstable behavior due to a naive implementation of the autonomy. In this article, we propose an energy-based architecture for shared autonomy that allows to reproduce as closely as possible the desired behavior, while ensuring a robust stability of the robotic system. The proposed architecture is experimentally validated in two application scenarios: shared control of a multirobot system and variable admittance control in human robot collaboration