Cooperative Trajectory Planning through Negotiation for a Stand-Up Aid

Shared control research offers promising opportunities and improvements for people with limited mobility through robotic assistance, for example in wheelchair applications or rehabilitation systems. Such systems also offer a wide range of possibilities for assisting people with limited mobility out of bed. In contrast to existing works in the field of shared control, in which the reference trajectory is assumed to be known to both partners or is specified by one of them in a leader-follower approach, this work aims to enable both partners to influence the reference trajectory. To this end, two existing approaches from the literature are implemented. The first one is a trajectory deformation approach and the other an existing work on cooperative agreement through trajectory negotiation. Both are investigated in simulations and the results show that the cooperative agreement process requires less control effort on the part of the humans to communicate their trajectory request than in trajectory negotiation. The results thus promise an advantage through cooperation already at the trajectory level of a shared control system.