Handing over objects is a common basic task that arises between people in many cooperative scenarios. On a daily basis, we effortlessly and successfully perform countless unscripted handovers without any explicit communication. However, handing over an object to a person is a challenging task for robotic “hands”, and the resulting interaction is often unnatural. To improve human-robot cooperation, the work described in this thesis has led to the design of a human-inspired handover controller based on analysis and characterization of the haptic interaction during human-to-human object handover.

The first experiment in this thesis documents novel experimental work done to measure the dynamic interaction in human-human handovers. The grip forces and load forces experienced by the giver and the receiver during a handover are examined, and the key features are identified. Based on these experimental results, guidelines for designing humanrobot handovers are proposed. Next, this thesis describes a handover controller model that enables robots to hand over objects to people in a safe, efficient, and intuitive manner, and an implementation of the handover controller on a Willow Garage PR2 robot is documented. Finally, a second experiment is presented, which compares various tunings of the novel controller in a user study. Results show that the novel controller yields more efficient and more intuitive robot-to-human handovers when compared to existing handover controllers.