Experimental Investigation of Human-Robot Cooperative Carrying

Intelligent robot assistants will be simpler for lay-persons to use if the robots are able to cooperate with their users anthromimetically. However, designing an anthromimetic robot controller requires knowledge of human behavior in the domain of interest. Previous works have identified cooperative carrying as an ideal task for robotic assistants, but studies of human behavior in this domain are few. In this paper, we present an experimental study of nineteen non-expert human subjects cooperatively carrying a long object with a robot partner. Our results demonstrate that human cooperative carrying behavior is much more complex than previously supposed, which has significant implications on the development of intelligent, physically interactive robot assistants.