Passive noninteracting control for human-robot team interaction

This paper is motivated by the control of robot teams by a human. Control challenges arise because i) typically, the team needs to achieve multiple control objectives, shared between the robot team and the human, in order to accomplish a task, ii) robust stability needs to be guaranteed to facilitate the safe interaction with the human and the apriori unknown environment. The concept of passivity has been successfully applied for robust stabilization of robotic systems, however, not in the context of shared control in human-robot team interaction. In this paper we propose a novel control approach which decouples the robot team dynamics into multiple subsystems, each having a different control objective. The proposed control law, suitable for the interaction of the robot team with the human or environment, guarantees passivity of the subsystems. The approach is illustrated in a simulation.