Bernardo Noronha | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Delay-Compensated Stiffness Estimation for Robot-Mediated Dyadic Interaction

Robot-mediated human-human (dyadic) interactions enable therapists to provide physical therapy remotely, yet an accurate perception of patient stiffness remains challenging due to network-induced haptic delays. Conventional stiffness estimation methods, which neglect delay, suffer from temporal misalignment between force and position signals, leading to significant estimation errors as delays increase. To address this, we propose a robust, delay-compensated stiffness estimation framework by deriving an algebraic estimator based on quasi-static equilibrium that explicitly accounts for temporally aligning the expert's input with the novice's response. A Normalised Weighted Least Squares (NWLS) implementation is then introduced to robustly filter dynamic bias resulting from the algebraic derivation. Experiments using commercial rehabilitation robots (H-MAN) as the platform demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the standard estimator, maintaining consistent tracking accuracy under multiple introduced delays. These findings offer a promising solution for achieving high-fidelity haptic perception in remote dyadic interaction, potentially facilitating reliable stiffness assessment in therapeutic settings across networks.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Generalizing Robot Trajectories from Single-Context Human Demonstrations: A Probabilistic Approach

Generalizing robot trajectories from human demonstrations to new contexts remains a key challenge in Learning from Demonstration (LfD), particularly when only single-context demonstrations are available. We present a novel Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based approach that enables systematic generalization from single-context demonstrations to a wide range of unseen start and goal configurations. Our method performs component-level reparameterization of the GMM, adapting both mean vectors and covariance matrices, followed by Gaussian Mixture Regression (GMR) to generate smooth trajectories. We evaluate the approach on a dual-arm pick-and-place task with varying box placements, comparing against several baselines. Results show that our method significantly outperforms baselines in trajectory success and fidelity, maintaining accuracy even under combined translational and rotational variations of task configurations. These results demonstrate that our method generalizes effectively while ensuring boundary convergence and preserving the intrinsic structure of demonstrated motions.

cs.RO↗