Human–Robot Sharing Operation in Cotransporting for Nonholonomic Mobile Robot

In this article, human–robot sharing operation in cotransporting for a nonholonomic mobile robot is studied. Sharing operation weights of human and nonholonomic mobile robot are proposed to avoid dynamical obstacles in an unknown environment, which assigns operation weights to human and robot based on sensory information of environment, the balance of task between “following the human” and “autonomous obstacle avoidance” is further realized. A local multimodal obstacle avoidance method based on 2-D Lidar is proposed, which deals with the interference of unrelated obstacles. In addition, we designed a mechanism to estimate human motion intention and integrated it into the nonholonomic mobile robotic platform for following the human. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively deal with the problem of human–robot cotransporting for a nonholonomic mobile robot in an unknown environment, can avoid obstacle and ensure human's operation comfort in cotransporting.