Chen Tiffany L, Bhattacharjee Tapomayukh, McKay J Lucas, Borinski Jacquelyn E, Hackney Madeleine E, Ting Lena H, Kemp Charles C
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA.
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA, USA.
PLoS One. 2015 May 20;10(5):e0125179. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0125179. eCollection 2015.
Our long-term goal is to enable a robot to engage in partner dance for use in rehabilitation therapy, assessment, diagnosis, and scientific investigations of two-person whole-body motor coordination. Partner dance has been shown to improve balance and gait in people with Parkinson's disease and in older adults, which motivates our work. During partner dance, dance couples rely heavily on haptic interaction to convey motor intent such as speed and direction. In this paper, we investigate the potential for a wheeled mobile robot with a human-like upper-body to perform partnered stepping with people based on the forces applied to its end effectors. Blindfolded expert dancers (N=10) performed a forward/backward walking step to a recorded drum beat while holding the robot's end effectors. We varied the admittance gain of the robot's mobile base controller and the stiffness of the robot's arms. The robot followed the participants with low lag (M=224, SD=194 ms) across all trials. High admittance gain and high arm stiffness conditions resulted in significantly improved performance with respect to subjective and objective measures. Biomechanical measures such as the human hand to human sternum distance, center-of-mass of leader to center-of-mass of follower (CoM-CoM) distance, and interaction forces correlated with the expert dancers' subjective ratings of their interactions with the robot, which were internally consistent (Cronbach's α=0.92). In response to a final questionnaire, 1/10 expert dancers strongly agreed, 5/10 agreed, and 1/10 disagreed with the statement "The robot was a good follower." 2/10 strongly agreed, 3/10 agreed, and 2/10 disagreed with the statement "The robot was fun to dance with." The remaining participants were neutral with respect to these two questions.
我们的长期目标是使机器人能够参与交谊舞，用于两人全身运动协调的康复治疗、评估、诊断和科学研究。交谊舞已被证明可以改善帕金森病患者和老年人的平衡及步态，这激发了我们的工作。在交谊舞过程中，舞伴严重依赖触觉互动来传达诸如速度和方向等运动意图。在本文中，我们研究了一个具有类人上身的轮式移动机器人基于施加在其末端执行器上的力与人进行合拍迈步的潜力。10名蒙眼的专业舞者在握住机器人末端执行器的同时，随着录制的鼓点向前/向后行走一步。我们改变了机器人移动基座控制器的导纳增益和机器人手臂的刚度。在所有试验中，机器人都能以较低的滞后（M = 224，SD = 194毫秒）跟随参与者。高导纳增益和高手臂刚度条件在主观和客观测量方面都带来了显著改善的表现。诸如人手到人的胸骨距离、领舞者质心到跟随者质心（CoM-CoM）的距离以及相互作用力等生物力学测量与专业舞者对他们与机器人互动的主观评分相关，这些评分具有内部一致性（克朗巴哈系数α = 0.92）。在回答最后一份问卷时，1/10的专业舞者强烈同意，5/10同意，1/10不同意“这个机器人是个好跟随者”这一说法。2/10强烈同意，3/10同意，2/10不同意“与这个机器人跳舞很有趣”这一说法。其余参与者对这两个问题持中立态度。
