In collaborative work settings such as manipulating one object between two users, two people have to work together to solve a task, it is unclear to what extent non-verbal, non-social communication cues are used for cooperation. We conducted an experiment to study human-human haptic communication during physical collaborations, and see whether there are differences between two people collaborating or one person performing the task bimanually. We used two haptic devices (Phantom Touch; 3D SYSTEMS) to interface humans with a virtual reality setup involving balancing a ball at given target locations on a board. The task was performed either bimanually by one participant, or dyadically by two participants, with or without haptic feedback. The task requires that the two sides coordinate with each other, in real-time, to balance the ball at the target. We found that with training the completion time and number of velocity peaks of the ball decreased, and that participants gradually became consistent in their braking strategy. Moreover, we found that the presence of haptic information improved the performance (decreased completion time) and led to an increase in overall cooperative movements. While in the dyadic task, there were competitive movements that were not present in the bimanual task, the overall performance (time and smoothness) was similar. One major difference was the delay between coordinating actions which was always smaller, and unaffected by the presence or absence of haptic feedback in the bimanual task. However haptic information significantly decreased the delay in cooperative movements within the dyadic condition. We show that haptic communication plays an important role in the collaboration between humans. It carries valuable information that implicitly allows humans to better understand each other, and decreases the delay between two humans during cooperative movements. Overall, our results show that humans can better coordinate with one another when haptic feedback is available. These results also highlight the likely importance of haptic communication in human-robot physical interaction, both as a tool to infer human intentions and to make the robot behaviour interpretable to humans.
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In collaborative work settings such as manipulating one object between two users, two people have to work together to solve a task, it is unclear to what extent non-verbal, non-social communication cues are used for cooperation. We conducted an experiment to study human-human haptic communication during physical collaborations, and see whether there are differences between two people collaborating or one person performing the task bimanually. We used two haptic devices (Phantom Touch; 3D SYSTEM...
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