Ergonomically Intelligent Physical Human-Robot Interaction: Postural Estimation, Assessment, and Optimization

Abstract: Ergonomics and human comfort are essential concerns in physical human-robot interaction. Common practical methods in the area either fail in estimating the correct posture due to occlusion or suffer from inaccurate ergonomics models in performing postural optimization. We propose a novel alternative framework for posture estimation, assessment, and optimization for ergonomically intelligent physical human-robot interaction. We show that we can estimate human posture solely from the trajectory of the interacting robot with median deviation of 5 deg from motion capture. We propose DULA, a differentiable ergonomics assessment tool with 99.73% accuracy comparing to RULA. We use DULA in postural optimization for physical human-robot interaction tasks such as co-manipulation and teleoperation. We evaluate our framework through human and simulation experiments.