Collaborative robots are increasingly sharing workspaces with human operators, making tool handover a frequent and safety-critical micro-interaction. However, traditional static handovers often lead to awkward grasps when handling asymmetric industrial tools. This paper presents a receiver-centered voice-driven adaptive handover system for mechanical tools, built on a Franka cobot. Using an LLM for intention recognition and MediaPipe for real-time 3D hand tracking, the framework dynamically adjusts the end-effector's orientation to present tools in an ergonomically optimal, handle-first pose. A within-subjects study compared this adaptive approach with an object-agnostic static baseline. The results demonstrate that the adaptive system reduces the grasp delay for asymmetric tools, improving the fluency of the interaction. Furthermore, the adaptive strategy improved specific trust-related perceptions, particularly motion predictability and perceived task simplicity.
The transition of autonomous mobile robots from controlled industrial settings to dynamic, human-centric environments, such as manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare, has made their safe and autonomous operation a critical area of research. These sophisticated machines must be…
Virtual Reality (VR) offers a flexible and controllable platform for studying human-robot interaction. Prior work has explored VR for socially aware robot navigation. However, whether VR captures the multimodal interaction dynamics observed in real-world human-robot co-navigation…
Improvements in the technical performance of human--robot interaction (HRI) systems do not automatically translate into differences that human users can detect during live interaction. This paper investigates whether a 15 percentage point gain in end-to-end task success (from 75%…
Effective social robot navigation requires sensitivity to human behavior, often revealed through subtle skeletal cues like gait and orientation. We present Human-Aware Implicit Social Robot Navigation (HumAIN), a novel framework that fuses implicit social cues directly into the p…
Safe and socially compliant navigation remains a fundamental challenge for autonomous robots operating in human-populated environments. Beyond collision avoidance, robots must anticipate human motion and respect personal space to ensure human comfort. Model Predictive Control (MP…
Large-scale demonstration datasets have been central to recent progress in general-purpose robot policies. However, existing datasets are collected in human-absent settings, and policies trained on such data may perform tasks competently in isolation but fail to exhibit human-awa…