Stiffness-based understanding and modeling of contact tasks by human demonstration

Programming robots by human demonstration is an effective method for task-level robot programming. Robot programming for contact tasks such as assembly, where both motion and forces need to be controlled, requires an understanding of the interaction with the environment and cannot eeectively be accomplished by playing back recorded trajectories. Furthermore, since human demonstration is used to provide the motion and force trajectories, it is also important to include aspects of human movement control in the model of interaction with the environment. In this paper, we present a method of understanding and modeling contact tasks based on end-point stiiness using data obtained by human demonstration. The concept of end-point stii-ness has been used both for explaining human movement control and for the control of robots. Experimental results demonstrate the eeectiveness of the method in understanding and interpreting the data obtained by human demonstration of contact tasks.