SearcharxivSearch

arXiv · 2407.21339

A Cooperation Control Framework Based on Admittance Control and Time-varying Passive Velocity Field Control for Human-Robot Co-carrying Tasks

Abstract

Human-robot co-carrying tasks reveal their potential in both industrial and everyday applications by leveraging the strengths of both parties. Effective control of robots in these tasks requires managing the energy level in the closed-loop systems to prevent potential dangers while also minimizing motion errors to complete the shared tasks. The collaborative tasks pose numerous challenges due to varied human intentions in adapting to workspace characteristics, leading to human-robot conflicts. In this paper, we develop a cooperation control framework for human-robot co-carrying tasks constructed by utilizing reference generator and low-level controller to aim to achieve safe interaction and synchronized human-robot movement. Firstly, the human motion predictions are corrected in the event of prediction errors based on the conflicts measured by the interaction forces through admittance control, thereby mitigating conflict levels. Low-level controller using an energy-compensation passive velocity field control approach allows encoding the corrected motion to produce control torques for the robot. In this manner, the closed-loop robotic system is passive when the energy level exceeds the predetermined threshold, and otherwise. Furthermore, the proposed control approach ensures that the system's kinetic energy is compensated within a finite time interval. The passivity, stability, convergence rate of energy, and power flow regulation are analyzed from theoretical viewpoints. Human-in-the-loop experiments involving 18 participants have demonstrated that the proposed method significantly enhances task performance and reduces human workload, as evidenced by both objective metrics and subjective evaluations, with improvements confirmed by statistical tests (p < 0.05) relative to baseline methods.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Dang Van Trong, Hiroki Kotake, Sumitaka Honji, Takahiro Wada. 2024-07-31. A Cooperation Control Framework Based on Admittance Control and Time-varying Passive Velocity Field Control for Human-Robot Co-carrying Tasks. https://doi.org/10.1109/tase.2025.3628318

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

IMLE-VLA: Fast Single-Step Action Generation for Vision-Language-Action Policies

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies leverage pretrained vision-language backbones to achieve strong cross-task generalization. A leading design couples this backbone with a dedicated continuous action head trained via diffusion or flow matching. However, such heads rely on iterative multi-step sampling, for example 10 Euler steps in $\pi_{0.5}$. This creates an inference bottleneck that produces stop-and-go movement in the robot and slower task completion. We introduce IMLE-VLA, which replaces the iterative action head with a single-step conditional generator trained via conditional Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (cIMLE). The cIMLE objective promotes multimodal action coverage, avoiding the mode collapse of naive regression heads while eliminating multi-step sampling entirely. When IMLE-VLA is applied to $\pi_{0.5}$, it increases inference frequency 3.67x (55 Hz vs. 15 Hz), enabling up to 11x higher action throughput. On the 40-task LIBERO benchmark, IMLE-VLA achieves the highest average success rate (98.0%) among all baselines while leading in inference frequency. Under the test-time perturbations of LIBERO-plus, IMLE-VLA retains $\pi_{0.5}$'s robustness while other baselines degrade sharply, confirming that the cIMLE head preserves generalization. Real-world experiments on a Franka Emika Panda across four tasks demonstrate smoother motion (2.2x to 3.0x lower jerk) and faster task completion, with IMLE-VLA outperforming $\pi_{0.5}$ on every task and reducing average VLA inference time per episode by 3.9x to 6.6x. Videos and code are available at https://kianhk6.github.io/IMLE-VLA/

cs.RO

ObstaDiff: Generalizable Diffusion Policy Learning via Obstacle-aware Representations

Imitation learning has achieved impressive results in robotic manipulation, yet most existing approaches assume clean backgrounds and lack explicit mechanisms for obstacle-aware motion generation. Extending such policies to cluttered, real-world scenes with unstructured obstacles remains a key generalization challenge. We present ObstaDiff, a decomposed diffusion-policy framework with a lightweight obstacle-aware visual encoder. ObstaDiff extracts a structured target-obstacle-background representation, enabling the downstream alignment policy to generate end-effector trajectories toward a target-centered bottleneck pose while reasoning about surrounding obstacles. We evaluate ObstaDiff on 61 real-robot greenhouse trials per method (366 executions in total). ObstaDiff achieves 75.41% average task success and 8.20% average obstacle collision rate, outperforming representative imitation-learning baselines and improving generalization in cluttered agricultural scenes.

cs.RO

Testing Between the Test Cases: Proving End-to-End Steering in Conditions You Never Drove

AI-based automated vehicle testing is challenging because a model that passes every test condition can still fail in the real world. Formal verification offers a way to directly address this gap. On a simulated highway and an arterial road we trained two small end-to-end steering networks each in CARLA, one on clear conditions alone and one on clear, fog, night and low sun. All four models were driven against a 2.19 ft lane-departure budget. Without driving again, we used bound propagation, a formal method that reads the trained weights, to compute how far steering can drift at every disturbance strength between two captured images. One calculation covers more than a campaign could drive: on the arterial it spans 133 poses, where ten intensities each would be 10^133 combinations, in minutes on one GPU. Not only did formal verification find conditions that broke the clear-trained policy without simulation testing, it provided some preliminary evidence for potential failures between the test cases. Our overall conclusion is that formal verification is a viable complement to simulation, and could be adopted as a part of verification and validation for automated driving.

cs.RO