Human-Guided Co-Manipulation of Carbon Fiber Plies

2026-06-10

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenges of automating manipulation tasks involving deformable materials such as carbon fiber prepreg, which are difficult to handle due to their high compliance, while purely manual processing suffers from low efficiency and high labor intensity. To bridge this gap, the authors propose a multimodal human–robot collaborative control strategy that integrates voice commands, vision-based wrist tracking, and compliant force control, thereby combining human dexterity with robotic precision and stability. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms single-modality control methods in terms of intuitiveness, task efficiency, and overall performance, offering an effective and natural interaction paradigm for human–robot cooperative manipulation of flexible materials.

Abstract

The handling of flexible materials is a difficult task to fully automate due to the challenges caused by the deformability of these types of objects. Meanwhile, a fully manual process can be ergonomically challenging, tedious and inefficient. Thus, human-robot collaboration (HRC) and cooperative manipulation (co-manipulation) have received increasing interest in this field as they enable human involvement when needed while also improving productivity. To enable efficient co-manipulation and interaction between the human operator and the robot, different modalities and control methods are required. In this paper, we present and examine different control methods for co-manipulation of carbon fiber plies, evaluating the pros and cons of each method in a controlled setting. We propose that a multimodal combination of speech commands, wrist-tracking through vision, and force with compliant control would provide the best solution for complete and intuitive control of the task.

Problem

• human-robot collaboration
• co-manipulation
• flexible materials
• carbon fiber plies
• ergonomics

Innovation

• human-robot collaboration
• co-manipulation
• multimodal control
• compliant control
• flexible material handling