Towards real-time whole-body human dynamics estimation through probabilistic sensor fusion algorithms

Physical human–robot interaction is receiving a growing attention from the scientific community. One of the main challenges is to understand the principles governing the mutual behaviour during collaborative interactions between humans. In this context, the knowledge of human whole-body motion and forces plays a pivotal role. Current state of the art methods, however, do not allow one for reliable estimations of the human dynamics during physical human–robot interaction. This paper builds upon our former work on human dynamics estimation by proposing a probabilistic framework and an estimation tool for online monitoring of the human dynamics during human–robot collaboration tasks. The soundness of the proposed approach is verified in human–robot collaboration experiments and the results show that our probabilistic framework is able to estimate the human dynamic, thereby laying the foundation for more complex collaboration scenarios.