In this paper, we present a novel controller for safe, efficient, and intuitive robot-to-human object handovers and a set of experiments to evaluate user responses to the robot's handover behavior. The controller enables a robot to mimic human behavior by actively regulating the applied grip force according to the measured load force during a handover. We provide an implementation of the controller on a Willow Garage PR2 robot, demonstrating the feasibility of realizing our design on robots with basic sensor/actuator capabilities. A user study comparing four variations of our controller shows that our design yields both human-like and human-preferred object handovers.

While most engineering schools substantially agree on the general form of the design process that should be used to address engineering design problems, surprisingly little is known about the actual practical effectiveness of many recommended techniques. In this paper and presentation, we review some of the recent evidence concerning the effectiveness of several well- known practices related to ideation - i.e., generating alternative potential solutions to a design problem.