With regard to both human and robot capabilities, human-robot interaction provides several benefits, and this will be significantly developed and implemented. This work focuses on the development of real-time external force/position control used for human-robot interaction. The force-controlled robotic system integrated with proportional integral control was performed and evaluated to ensure its reliably and timely operational characteristics, in which appropriate proportional integral gains were experimentally adopted using a set of virtual crank-turning tests. The designed robotic system is made up of a robot manipulator arm, an ATI Gamma multi-axis force/torque sensor and a real-time external PC based control system. A proportional integral controller has been developed to provide stable and robust force control on unknown environmental stiffness and motion. To quantify its effectiveness, the robotic system has been verified through a comprehensive set of experiments, in which force measurement and ALTER real-time path control systems were evaluated. In summary, the results indicated satisfactorily stable performance of the robot force/position control system. The gain tuning for proportional plus integral control algorithm was successfully implemented. It can be reported that the best performance as specified by the error root mean square method of the radial force is observed with proportional and integral gains of 0.10 and 0.005 respectively.

One of the challenging aspects of robotics research is to successfully establish a human-like behavioural control strategy for human–robot handover, since a robotic controller is further complicated by the dynamic nature of the human response. This paper consequently highlights the development of an appropriate set of behaviour-based control for robot-to-human object handover by first understanding an equivalent human–human handover. The optimized hybrid position and impedance control was implemented to ensure good stability, adaptability and comfort of the robot in the object handover tasks. Moreover, a questionnaire technique was employed to gather information from the participants concerning their evaluations of the developed control system. The results demonstrate that the quantitative measurement of performance of the human-inspired control strategy can be considered acceptable for seamless human–robot handovers. This also provided significant satisfaction with the overall control performance in the robotic control system, in which the robot can dexterously pass the object to the receiver in a timely and natural manner without the risk of harm or injury by the robot. Furthermore, the survey responses were in agreement with the parallel test outcomes, demonstrating significant satisfaction with the overall performance of the robot–human interaction, as measured by an average rating of 4.20 on a five-point scale.

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This research focuses on the development of the conceptual frameworks of human-human interaction applied for a robotic behaviour-based approach for safe physical human-robot interaction. The control has been constructed based on understanding the dynamic and kinematic behavioural characteristics of how two humans pass an object to each other. This has enabled a KR-16-KUKA robot to naturally interact with a human so as to facilitate the dexterous transfer of an object in an effective manner. Implicit force control based on Proportional Integral and Fuzzy Logic Control which allows the robot end effector's trajectory to be moderated based on the applied force in real-time was adopted. The experimental results have confirmed that the quantitative performance of the force-controlled robot is close to that of the human and can be considered acceptable for human-robot interaction. Furthermore, the control based Fuzzy Logic Control was shown to be slightly superior performance compared to Proportional Integral control.