Robotics and Autonomous Systems 159 (2023) 104311

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Robotics and Autonomous Systems

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/robot

Human–robot handover with prior-to-pass soft/rigid object

classification via tactile glove
∗
Ayan Mazhitov, Togzhan Syrymova, Zhanat Kappassov, Matteo Rubagotti
Department of Robotics and Mechatronics, School of Engineering and Digital Sciences, Nazarbayev University,
53 Kabanbay Batyr Ave, Astana, 010000, Kazakhstan

article info a b s t r a c t

Article history: Human–robot handovers constitute a challenging and fundamental aspect of physical human–robot
Received 3 February 2022 interaction. This paper describes the design and implementation of a human–robot handover pipeline
Received in revised form 7 October 2022 in the case in which both soft and rigid objects are passed by the human to the robot. These objects
Accepted 6 November 2022
require different profiles of grasping torques by the robot hand fingers, so as to avoid damaging them.
Available online 13 November 2022
As a viable solution to this problem, a tactile glove worn by the human is used to provide real-time
Keywords: information to a deep neural network, which classifies each object as soft or rigid in the pre-handover
Tactile sensors phase: this information is passed to the robot, which applies the grasping torque profile suitable for
Human–robot handover the specific type of object. The proposed method is designed and validated based on experiments with
Human–robot interaction eight human participants and 24 objects. The outcomes of these experiments regarding classification
Deep learning
accuracy, force and torque profiles, and evaluation of the subjective experiences via questionnaires,
are described and discussed.
© 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
A handover, which can be described as a sequence of co-
ordinated joint actions aimed at directly transferring an object
from a passer to a receiver [1], is a fundamental tool for sev-
eral human–human collaboration tasks. While humans intuitively
perform handovers multiple times every day, replacing either
passer or receiver with an autonomous robot (which would open
up tremendous opportunities in the field of robotic assistance)
is a challenging task, object of current research [2]; indeed, no
human–robot handover (HRH) solutions have been proposed so
far that can match the simplicity and performance of human–
human handovers (HHH). HRH (which is the object of this paper,
see Fig. 1) is a complex task, as it requires triggering the handover,
continuously estimating the human hand pose, deriving the loca-
tion and time of object transfer, generating a suitable robot mo-
tion, and managing the physical interaction during grasping. After
integrating these system components, one has to achieve a suffi-
ciently high success rate (i.e., the passed objects should rarely be
damaged), at the same time generating a motion that is perceived
by the human operator as safe, fluent, and comfortable [2].
In the HRH literature, the robot grasping is typically executed
without accounting for the rigidity of each handled object [3,4].
The focus of [3,4], further analyzed in Section 2, was in determin-
ing the best grasping configuration on the object (using mostly
∗ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: matteo.rubagotti@nu.edu.kz (M. Rubagotti).
rigid bodies) rather than on the possible issues deriving from
differences in deformability. However, a closer analysis of the
possible issues deriving from the physical interaction of robots
with soft objects has been conducted in recent years [5,6]. Indeed,
especially when deformable objects are involved, the ability to
recognize a soft object is a key feature in HRH. If this is not
done and the wrong grasping force is applied, some objects
could be damaged; this is shown in Fig. 2, which highlights the
consequences of soft/rigid misclassification in our approach, with
consequent application of an excessively small grasping force for
rigid objects (which can slip), and of an excessively large grasping
force for soft objects (which can be deformed).
A wide range of sensory inputs allows humans to distinguish
deformable and fragile objects from rigid ones. Accordingly, hu-
mans adapt their grasping force to avoid damage and, at the same
time, slippage. Therefore, in order to design a robot assistant
that can pass or receive soft objects as well as rigid ones, one
should equip the system with sensors that can detect the intrinsic
properties of the objects, as stated in [7]. A possibility would be to
use tactile sensors on the robot gripper, as done in [8,9] outside
the HRH field. The use of such an approach within HRH would
require adding a phase in which the human holds the object
while the robot explores it, before the actual handover happens.
This would lead to an increased execution time of the HRH task,
and to an increased risk of damaging deformable objects during
the exploration phase. Considering that the human has to grasp
the object before passing it to the robot, and that the ability of
humans to handle different objects without damaging them is

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.robot.2022.104311
0921-8890/© 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
A. Mazhitov, T. Syrymova, Z. Kappassov et al.
Fig. 1. Implemented experimental setup for human–robot handover with prior-to-pass soft/rigid object classification. The passer is a participant wearing a tactile
glove, while the receiver is a Franka Emika robot arm integrated with an Allegro robot hand.
much more developed than in robots, our idea is to perform the
soft/rigid classification at the moment when the human grasps
the object. In order to make this possible, we propose to at-
tach tactile sensors to a fabric-made glove worn by the operator
(giver), which (via a deep-learning-based classification algorithm)
informs the robot (receiver) about the softness of the object. In
turn, the robot gripper will use two different grasping forces to
prevent deformation of soft objects and slippage of rigid objects
(cf. [10]). The same tactile glove allows us to detect when the
human releases the object, so as to determine when the robot
can start moving again to place it at a given location. Should
the proposed method for soft/rigid object classification be used
within a more realistic task, for instance in a manufacturing
scenario, then the features of the glove could be employed for
other purposes, such as object slippage detection from the human
hand (see, e.g., [11]) or texture recognition (see, e.g., [12]).
The main contribution of our paper is to answer to the follow-
ing two related research questions:
Is it possible to execute HRH with different robot grasping force
for soft and rigid objects, without previous knowledge of the object
characteristics? If yes, with what success rate?
Indeed, the existing handover approaches in the HRH field
were never specifically designed to provide a different grasp-
ing force for soft and rigid objects, as it is done in our work.
More in detail, the proposed HRH pipeline presents the following
features which, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, were
never proposed in the literature, and thus constitute innova-
tive contributions: (i) use of a wearable tactile glove to classify
rigid/deformable objects prior to handover; (ii) adaptation of the
robot grasping force for HRH based on the above-mentioned
classification; (iii) use of the tactile glove to determine the end
of the passing phase.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. After a
brief state-of-the-art review in Section 2, our HRH pipeline with
prior-to-pass object classification phase is presented in
Section 3. Details of the experimental platform are given in
Section 4. Section 5 describes the training and testing of the deep
neural network used for soft/rigid object classification, while the
experimental evaluation of our pipeline with different human
participants is described and discussed in Section 6. Finally,
conclusions are drawn in Section 7.
All experimental protocols described in this paper were ap-
proved by the Nazarbayev University Institutional Research Ethics
Committee, and written informed consent was obtained for all
participants.
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Robotics and Autonomous Systems 159 (2023) 104311
2. State of the art
This section provides an overview of the state of the art
in methods for the design of the pre-handover phase and for
tactile object detection, as these two aspects are central for the
development of our method. As claimed in [1], to properly design
the behavior of the robot in an HRH task, it is important to
understand how people act in corresponding HHH activities. A
detailed description of how HHH has been analyzed to provide
guidance in the design of HRH systems (in terms of motion flu-
ency, modulation of grip forces, vision and tactile sensor abilities,
and design of robot arm controllers) is out of the scope of this
paper, but the interested reader is referred to [1,13–17] for a more
in-depth discussion on this topic.
2.1. The pre-handover phase
The handover phase in HRH is always preceded by a so-called
pre-handover phase, which includes a signal of intention by the
operator to start the handover action, the human hand pose
estimation, and the derivation of the place and time of object
transfer.
Two main approaches are available for pre-handover. The
online approach aims at tracking the human hand (or the object)
position and to estimate the transfer location, using either a
vision system [3,4], or wearable sensing devices [18], or IMU
sensors [19,20]. Instead, the offline approach requires the presence
of robotic touch sensors, which detect the time instant when the
human places the object on a predefined location within the robot
palm [21,22].
In recent years, researchers included object classification into
the pre-handover phase (e.g., [3,4]), using RGB-D cameras to-
gether with deep learning (DL) techniques, so as to detect an
object within the human hand. These vision sensors had been
used to select the grasping points with the highest likelihood
of success via Generative Grasping Convolutional Neural Net-
works [3] and 6-DOF GraspNet [4]. In these works, in which both
rigid and soft objects were used, the grasping was executed by
applying the same gripper forces to all objects, as their deforma-
bility was not crucial for the considered case studies. However,
if such a classification were needed (for example due to the
presence of fragile objects), vision sensors could not be used to
estimate deformability; instead, the best type of sensors for this
task are tactile sensors [5].
A. Mazhitov, T. Syrymova, Z. Kappassov et al.
Fig. 2. Successful and failed handovers in the implemented experimental setup. Soft object (plastic cup) detected correctly (a) and misclassified (b). Rigid object
(bottle) detected correctly (c) and misclassified (d). When misclassified, the plastic cup was deformed and damaged when grasped by the robot hand, while the
bottle slipped from it.
2.2. Tactile gloves in deformable object classification
In our proposed approach, in order to be able to obtain in-
formation from tactile sensors (see, e.g., [22–24]), the latter are
placed on a custom-made glove built in our laboratory, which
is worn by the human operator. In general, the aim of the tac-
tile glove is to provide information, via its sensors, on different
properties of the grasped objects, such as softness, texture, mass
and shape. A tactile glove can incorporate more than one sensing
modality, and be stretchable and flexible, so as to precisely cover
the curved surface of the human hand [25,26].
In the robotics literature, tactile gloves have been used for
providing a tactile image of a contact area or for tracking human
limb motion [27]. For example, the authors of [16] used a motion
capture data glove (Cyber Glove) with force sensitive resistors
(TekSan patches) to monitor human intentions during handovers.
Tactile gloves were also used in [28] to identify an object and
estimate its weight, independently of the type of applied grasp;
this was achieved by acquiring information from pressure sensors
on the glove via DL, feeding a tactile image as a frame to a con-
volutional neural network (CNN). The authors of [29] proposed
a tactile glove (MemGlove) incorporating resistive and fluidic
sensing to estimate the stiffness of an object via DL; the method
was tested to recognize the stiffness of six geometrically identical
deformable objects (3D-printed materials, EcoFlex silicones, and
foams) using the same hand position and grasping force for all
objects.
To the best of our knowledge, the use of tactile gloves for
binary classification of soft and rigid objects during HRH (which
is a contribution of our approach) has never been proposed in the
literature.
3. The proposed HRH pipeline
Fig. 3 illustrates the concise block diagram of the proposed
HRH pipeline, with the yellow envelope indicating the phases
that specifically rely on our contributions. These consist of the
following: (a) in the pre-handover phase, of the soft/rigid object
classification via tactile glove; (b) in the handover phase, of the
use of this classification to modulate the grasping force, and of
the use of tactile glove information to end the passing phase. The
following subsections describe each stage of the block diagram in
Fig. 3.
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Robotics and Autonomous Systems 159 (2023) 104311
3.1. Object classification
The pre-handover phase starts with the supervised-learning-
based classification of the object grasped by the giver, in which
our classifier recognizes if the object picked up by the human is
soft or rigid. In order to train this classifier, a dataset has to be
generated: several participants wear the tactile glove and grasp
objects, which are already labeled as soft/rigid, and raw signals
from the tactile glove are recorded for each object; then, a deep
neural network is trained based on these data (one-dimensional
arrays representing the signals) and labels, to output the object
class (soft/rigid).
3.2. Pose estimation
After the object is classified, the next stage consists of deter-
mining the handover location, which is not a-priori fixed, but
changes based on the human hand position (i.e., we apply an
online method, as described in Section 2). Indeed, in real-world
applications with possibly dynamic environments, it is desirable
not to fix a priori the handover location [2], and, thus, this has
to be estimated. A possible approach, used in our work, is to
incorporate a marker into the tactile glove, so as to estimate
its location using a camera system (e.g., a visual motion track-
ing system made of multiple cameras detecting a simple visual
marker, or an RGB-D camera detecting an ArUco marker). The
time evolution of this location, defined in a fixed reference frame
centered at the base of the manipulator, can be used to estimate
the hand speed. Using this information, it is possible to detect
when the hand stops: the corresponding coordinates are then
passed to the motion planning software.
3.3. Trajectory calculation
Once the handover location has been determined based on the
human hand position, the manipulator has to plan a trajectory
from its current configuration to a point close to the hand position
(according to a given offset), with a suitable final orientation.
The robot motion has to be planned in real time, and thus the
planning routine should be executed as fast as possible to obtain a
smooth handover process. At the same time, the planned motion
has to be smooth and to avoid possible obstacles in the robot
workspace. To achieve all of this, one possibility is to use state-
of-the-art sampling-based motion planning algorithms, such as
rapidly-exploring random trees (RRT) [30].
A. Mazhitov, T. Syrymova, Z. Kappassov et al.
Fig. 3. Block diagram of the proposed HRH pipeline. (For interpretation of the
references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version
of this article.)
3.4. Handover
When the robot hand has reached the object transfer location,
the grasping phase begins. As mentioned in [13], the physical
transfer occurs when the receiver makes initial contact with the
object. In our case, we make the assumption that the passer is
responsible for the initial contact, by inserting the object into the
robot’s hand. This event is detected by monitoring the derivative
of the sum of the torques of the manipulator: if its value is higher
than an empirically derived threshold c1 , then the algorithm can
conclude that contact has been made, and the robot can grasp
the object. It is crucial to stress that not all robotic manipulators
are well equipped to detect the presence of external loads when
these cause only slight perturbations of the joint torques. If this
had to be an issue, a possibility would be to avoid monitoring
joint torques, and instead use an image processing pipeline to
identify if the object is within the robotic hand, and consequently
start grasping it. Alternatively, one could use a tactile sensor
(e.g., FSR) attached to the robot hand, for the same purpose.
The actual grasping by the robot is then executed by lim-
iting the maximum torque of each joint of its hand, choosing
the correct threshold based on the above-mentioned soft/rigid
classification result.
The tactile glove is also used to detect when the participant
releases the object. According to [13], the human can release the
object only after the robot hand has achieved a stable grasp: in
our framework, this is determined by the human, who has to
assess when the object has been safely grasped by the robot. At
this point, the human simply releases the object, and this event
is detected via the tactile sensors on the glove. More precisely,
the variation of the total pressure applied by the human operator
to the grasped object is estimated by summing the derivatives
of the values of the signals of all pressure sensors on the glove:
when the absolute value of this sum is above a threshold c2 , also
determined experimentally, the retreat stage will be initiated. The
derivative of the sum of the pressures is used rather than the sum
itself, in order not to be affected by possible biases that can often
occur in pressure sensors readings.
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Robotics and Autonomous Systems 159 (2023) 104311
3.5. Retreat
During this last phase, the robot calculates the trajectory to
return to its default configuration by means of a motion planning
algorithm as done during the stage described in Section 3.3. After
that, the robot moves its end effector above a box and releases
the object: two boxes are present, for soft and rigid objects
respectively.
4. Experimental setup
The experimental platform used for the evaluation of HRH
with the proposed prior-to-grasp classification mainly consists of
two separate systems, in addition to the passed objects: robot
arm with the hand and related vision sensors, and tactile glove
(see Fig. 1). In the following, we describe the hardware and
software components of the experimental setup of our case study.
The proposed pipeline is not dependent on these components
and, with suitable technical modifications, can be applied using
a different robot manipulator/hand, a different vision system, or
a different tactile glove.
4.1. Robot and vision sensors
As manipulator, we used a torque-controlled Franka Emika
Panda, placed on a metal table. This robot is particularly suitable
for safe physical human–robot interaction, due to its ability to
stop whenever an unwanted contact is detected by its torque sen-
sors. The arm controller was interfaced with a computer (Z4 HP
workstation with 32 GB DDR4, Intel Core i9, NVIDIA RTX2080Ti,
and Linux operating system with real-time Ubuntu kernel) via
a licensed Franka Control Interface (FCI) with a 1 kHz sampling
rate. We used the MoveIt plugin with the RRT-Connect motion
planning library to steer the end effector to its goal configuration.
Using the MoveIt plugin, we obtained the Cartesian path between
two points and estimated a collision-free trajectory of the robot
motion.
As end effector, we used a 16 degrees-of-freedom (DoF)
torque-controlled robot hand (Allegro hand, WonikRobotics), in-
terfaced with the above-mentioned computer via CAN bus and
PEAK PCAN-USB adapter at 333 Hz. The hand weights 1.08 kg and
can grasp objects up to 5 kg in mass. As, without end effector, the
maximum payload of the robot arm would be 3 kg, the objects
used in our experiments could have a mass up to 1.92 kg. The
robot hand employed the Envelop Grasp algorithm, which was
used to wrap each object with all four fingers.
An Intel RealSense D435 RGB-D camera, which streams at 60
fps with a 940 × 522 resolution, was mounted apart from the
robot arm to acquire an isometric view of both human operator
and robot (Fig. 4). The camera was fixed on a cubic structure with
side length of 1 m, made of Bosch Rexroth aluminium profiles.
All the components of the platform communicated via Robot
Operating System (ROS) with Melodic distribution. The camera
detects an ArUco marker placed on the human wrist (Fig. 4) to
track its position and to determine the handover location (as
explained in Section 3.2 for the general case).
4.2. Tactile glove
A fabric-based wearable tactile glove, designed and fabricated
in our laboratory, was interfaced with the above-mentioned com-
puter via ROS. The glove is capable of measuring pressure distri-
bution and mechanical vibrations at the points of contact.
A. Mazhitov, T. Syrymova, Z. Kappassov et al.
Fig. 4. Human hand pose estimation: (4(a)) camera view with the detected human hand via ArUco marker and (4(b)) visualized frames (in ROS RViz). The green
cube represents the human hand pose with respect to the base frame of the manipulator. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the
reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
4.2.1. Pressure distribution
The pressure sensing module is composed of 27 pressure
sensors distributed over the palm and fingers (Fig. 1). These
sensors consist of five arrays of barometers molded within sili-
cone (Takkstrip2, RightHand labs). In turn, each Takkstrip2 array
consists of three separate barometers and one solid 3 × 1 array of
barometers. Single barometers were each placed on the distal, in-
termediate, and proximal phalanx of each finger. Four solid 3 × 1
arrays of barometers were mounted in the middle of the palm, at
the location of the metacarpal bones. The data acquisition from
all 27 sensors was synchronized and sampled at 100 Hz with a
multiplexer (TakkFast interface board, I2C protocol) connected to
the robot computer.
4.2.2. Mechanical vibrations
The vibration sensing module of the tactile glove consists
of two MEMS accelerometers (Analog Devices, ADXL303) with
analog outputs, attached onto the fingertip of thumb and index
finger. The circuitry around the sensor was designed to pro-
vide a physical bandwidth of 1 kHz. For data acquisition, we
used an ARM Cortex M4 based STM32f3discovery microcontroller
board and two custom-made analog-to-digital converter modules
(Analog Devices, AD7685). These were connected with the micro-
controller via serial bus in a cascaded configuration [11], while
the microcontroller was connected with the computer through
its sound card, which can sample the input data stream with a
rate of up to 8 kHz.
4.3. Objects
To preserve the variety of objects used in daily life, we selected
12 deformable objects and 12 stiff objects of different size, ge-
ometry and mass (the latter up to 1.92 kg to meet the payload
limitations of the robot arm). These are shown in Fig. 5. We
used 18 out of 24 objects to generate the training dataset; the
remaining six objects (whose names are shown in red in Fig. 5)
were used to test the approach on arbitrary (unknown) objects
during HRH.
5. DL for tactile object classification
In this section, we provide a description for our case study
of the training and testing of DL models for soft/rigid object
classification, already described from a general perspective in
Section 3.1.
5.1. Experimental procedure
To obtain data, experiments were conducted with four healthy
participants, all students at Nazarbayev University in the 20–24
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Robotics and Autonomous Systems 159 (2023) 104311
age range, and referred to as Group A. Each participant grasped
the same 18 objects (9 rigid and 9 soft, with names written in
black in Fig. 5) that will be simply indicated as old objects. Each
object was grasped ten times using two different grasping modes:
five times using the prismatic 4-finger-thumb grasp (Fig. 6(a))
and five times using the power grasp (Fig. 6(b)). In both cases,
the object was grasped with all fingertips: the difference was
that the palm was in contact with the object when using the
power grasp, and detached from it in case the prismatic 4-finger-
thumb grasp was employed. For a detailed description of these
modes, the reader is referred to [31,32]. These types of grasps are
very common, especially when dealing with object shapes that
are approximately spherical or cylindrical, as are the objects in
our case study. The participants were instructed to grasp each
object at a specific location, making sure that all relevant pressure
sensors on the tactile glove were in contact with the object for the
relevant time interval. In total, there were 360 trials (9 objects ×
4 people × 10 grasps) per class.
The output signals of the pressure sensors on the tactile glove
were recorded for 4.5 s in each experimental trial using the
rosbag function in ROS with a sampling frequency of 100 Hz
(both values were chosen via trial and error in preliminary ex-
periments). To limit the complexity of the DL models, only 17
out of the available 27 barometers were used; indeed, the sensors
on intermediate and proximal phalanges did not seem to provide
useful information for classification. A possible reason for it is
that our participants would always use their fingertips and (pos-
sibly) their palm for grasping, and thus the corresponding sensors
would almost always be in contact with the objects. On the
other hand, the sensors on intermediate and proximal phalanges
could be in contact or not, and this was mainly determined by
the object shape (in particular for large rigid objects): thus, the
output of these sensors would be heavily influenced by the object
shape rather than by its stiffness. As a result, each experimental
trial (one participant grasping one object) resulted in a one-
dimensional array of size 7650 (17 × 450). After all data were
recorded, the data were normalized on a [0, 1] scale.
To test the DL models described in the following on data
from different distributions, we invited four new participants,
who were also 20–24 years old Nazarbayev University students,
referred to in the remainder of the paper as Group B. They were
asked to grasp all objects shown in Fig. 5, with the names written
in red color (referred to as new objects) five times in the same
manner as described for the participants in Group A.
5.2. DL models and Classification Accuracy
The obtained training dataset (‘‘Group A - old objects’’) was
split into two separate subsets, for training and development
(dev). The training subset was used to tune the hyperparameters
A. Mazhitov, T. Syrymova, Z. Kappassov et al.
Fig. 5. List of objects used in the experiments. The objects with red names are those that were not used in the collection of the dataset. (For interpretation of the
references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
Fig. 6. Prismatic 4-finger-thumb grasp and power grasps.
of the DL models described in the remainder of this section,
while the dev subset was used for selecting the hyperparam-
eters that resulted in the highest accuracy. Finally, the best-
performing parameters were tested using the test set (‘‘Group B -
new objects’’).
As DL models we deployed a feed-forward neural network
(FNN) and a CNN to solve the binary classification problem. Both
the FNN and CNN models, with input layers size of 7650, were
implemented using the Pytorch library. The FNN model consists
of two hidden layers, each of them incorporating 512 units with
ReLu activation function. In the output layer, a softmax activation
function is instead used to calculate the probability distribution
over the predicted output classes. The CNN model consists of
three convolutional layers followed by two fully-connected lay-
ers. The convolutional layers incorporate four filters with kernel
size of 1 × 8 and with a stride of 4. The first fully-connected layer
consists of 512 units followed by ReLu activation function, while
the output layer operates a projection with a softmax activation
function. Both models were trained using the Adam algorithm
with a learning rate α = 10−5 , regularized via dropout (with
drop rate equal to 0.3). The models were trained with 104 epochs
and tested on the dev subset after each epoch. A single Tesla
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Robotics and Autonomous Systems 159 (2023) 104311
Table 1
Sensing modality performance in deformable object classification. V - vibration
sensors. P - pressure sensors. CNN - convolutional neural network. FNN -
feed-forward neural network.
ID Model Input feature Dev set Test set
V 77.5% 58.8%
1 CNN
P + V 93.5% 66.7%
P 97.7% 75.5%
2 FNN P 93.5% 62.2%
V100-SXM3-32 GB GPU on a Nvidia DGX machine was used to
train all models. As mentioned at the beginning of this subsection,
different hyperparameters have been tested before determining
the ones with best performance: for example, for the CNN we
varied the kernel size from 1 × 8 to 1 × 16, the size of the first
fully-connected layer from 128 to 1024 units, and the drop rate
from 0.0 to 0.4.
The results of our training are shown in Table 1, in which one
can see that the CNN outperformed the FNN in accuracy both in
the dev set (97.7% vs. 93.5%) and in the test set (75.5% vs. 62.2%).
As a consequence, we decided to use the trained CNN model for
HRH experiments.
5.3. Sensing modalities
As described in Section 2.2, the tactile glove incorporates both
mechanical vibration and pressure sensors, while the description
of the DL models in the previous part of this section only referred
to pressure sensors. This is due to the fact that, in contrast to our
previous work in which both pressure and mechanical vibration
sensors were placed on a robot hand for granular objects clas-
sification [33], we did not expect the use of vibration sensors
to increase the classification accuracy. Indeed, squeeze-induced
vibrations are produced by the collision of small particles within
a granular object when the latter is squeezed, but our HRH task
was predominantly executed with smooth/uniform objects. In
order to test this assumption, a CNN model similar to the one
described above, but with inputs given by vibration sensors only
or by both pressure and vibration sensors, was built. As expected,
the performance in the case of pressure sensors only was still
superior, as can be seen in Table 1.
A. Mazhitov, T. Syrymova, Z. Kappassov et al.
Table 2
Percentage of objects that either slipped or got deformed throughout experimental runs with various torque thresholds.
Case \Torque 0.1 N m 0.2 N m
Slippage - Rigid 88.89% 77.78%
Deformation - Rigid 0.00% 0.00%
Slippage - Soft 82.22% 37.78%
Deformation - Soft 0.00% 0.00%
Fig. 7. Time evolution of torques of each robot hand joint. The red dashed lines indicate the thresholds on the allowed maximum torque. The pink dashed line
indicates the average torque of all robot hand joints. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version
of this article.)
6. Experimental results on HRH
The HRH experiments involved 8 healthy participants, divided
into Group A and Group B and grasping both old and new objects:
however, this time a complete HRH experiment was executed.
The experimental procedure for each participant and each object
consisted of three phases.
In the first phase, the participant grasped one of the 24 objects
without any specific instructions on the contact location or on
paying attention to keep the tactile sensors in touch with the
object. This was done in order to assess the performance of the
classifier outside the training data distribution, so as to obtain
a more realistic HRH scenario. The grasping was repeated three
times using the 4-finger-thumb grasp, the power grasp (both
already used for CNN training and testing), and finally a grasp
without specific instructions, then used to bring the object to-
wards the robot. The soft/rigid classification via CNN was carried
out for all three grasps, and the object class was then determined
via hard voting.
In the second phase, the participant moved the object to-
wards the manipulator and stopped near the handover location:
the stopping time of the human hand was set when the mea-
sured speed of the marker was below the experimentally-derived
threshold of 10 mm/s. After that, the robot planned its trajectory
via RRT and reached its designated handover pose.
The third phase consisted of the actual handover, carried out
based on the threshold values detailed in the following.
6.1. Thresholds Determination
The handover phase was initiated when the sum of the robot
joint torques was above the threshold c1 described in Section 3.4,
experimentally set to 1.5 N m.
During handover, upper bounds of 0.5 N m and 0.3 N m
were imposed on the maximum torque for each robot hand
joint, for objects classified as rigid and soft, respectively. These
thresholds were developed empirically, by carrying out numerous
experimental trials. Each of the nine objects of both classes was
grasped and moved to the corresponding box using different
torque threshold values, ranging from 0.1 to 0.7 N m, repeating
the procedure five times for each object/threshold combination.
The results are illustrated in Table 2, in which we report the
percentage of experiments in which all rigid or soft objects were
either dropped or deformed (see also Fig. 2). To determine the
Robotics and Autonomous Systems 159 (2023) 104311
0.3 N m 0.4 N m 0.5 N m 0.6 N m 0.7 N m
28.89% 15.56% 4.44% 4.44% 4.44%
0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00%
11.11% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00% 0.00%
0.00% 24.44% 53.33% 66.67% 77.78%
threshold for each object type, we chose to minimize the sum
of percentages for which, applying that torque, the object was
either dropped or deformed. As a result, the best threshold for
soft objects was clearly 0.3 N m, which never caused deformation
and led to slippage in 11.11% of the cases. As for the threshold
for rigid objects, all values from 0.5 N m and above led to no
deformation, and slippage in 4.44% of the cases. The value 0.5 N
m was thus chosen considering what would happen in case of
misclassification: if a soft object were grasped with this torque
value, it would be deformed 53.33% of the times, which is a lower
percentage compared to those associated with higher torque
thresholds.
As for the obtained percentage of deformation or slippage
occurrence in the case of correct soft/rigid classification and con-
sequent application of the correct torque threshold, we can no-
tice that deformation never occurred, while slippage occurred in
4.44% of the cases for soft objects, and in 11.11% of the cases for
rigid objects. 4.44% for slippage of rigid objects corresponds to 2
trials out of 45. It is crucial to consider that the same three objects
- the beam, the level, and the ball - were involved. Therefore, the
slippage might most probably be explained by their small size
and inconvenient shape. For instance, the dimensions of the level
are 5.5 × 4 × 1.5 cm, while the size of the palm of the robot
hand is 9.5 × 14 cm. As a consequence, it is quite complicated
to grasp this object, and sometimes unstable grasps might occur.
On the other hand, the value of 11.11% obtained for soft objects
is less critical, as soft objects rarely get damaged when they fall,
and might instead get damaged when deformed. The influence
of these thresholds can be seen in Fig. 7, which depicts the time
evolution of all the robot hand joint torques and of their average
value when grasping a rigid (left) and a soft (right) object.
The robot was allowed to start the retreat phase when the
absolute value of the time derivative of the sum of the pressure
values from sensors was above threshold c2 , set equal to 90 kPa (
Fig. 8). This threshold was derived empirically from numerous
experimental trials in which two participants released all 18 ob-
jects ten times each. The chosen value provides a good trade-off
between the ‘‘false release trigger’’ and the ‘‘not activated trigger’’
scenarios for all objects and different participants. Lowering the
threshold would increase the ‘‘false release trigger’’ cases and, as
a result, reduce the safety of the HRH.
After that, the participant waited until the end of the robot
retreat phase and then initiated the first phase for a new ob-
ject by grasping it. The experimental procedure was repeated
7
A. Mazhitov, T. Syrymova, Z. Kappassov et al.
Fig. 8. The maximum absolute sum of the change in pressure values over all
sensors during release (in blue) and before release (in yellow) for all objects,
numbered as in Fig. 5. The straight blue line represents the chosen threshold of
90 kPa. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the
reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
for all objects. Statistical data regarding classification results
(Section 6.2) and interaction forces (Section 6.3) were recorded
to provide an objective evaluation of the efficacy of the proposed
HRH method. After repeating the experimental procedure for all
objects, each participant filled in a questionnaire to provide a
subjective evaluation of the HRH experience (Section 6.4). For a
better understanding of the experimental procedure, a video is
provided with this paper as supplementary material.
6.2. Pre-handover object classification
The outcome of the pre-handover soft/rigid object classifica-
tion during the HRH experiments is shown in Table 3.
We first analyze the results for the participants in Group A
while grasping the old objects: although these participants and
objects were used for training DL models, we would not have
expected the same accuracy as for the dev set in Table 1, because
a whole HRH experiment was run in this case (which could dis-
tract the subjects from the actual grasping action) and no specific
instruction was provided on contact location or on keeping the
tactile sensors in contact with the object, as mentioned above. As
expected, one can immediately notice that the accuracy obtained
in Table 1 when testing the same CNN used in HRH for the dev set
is higher than the accuracy shown in Table 3 for the combination
‘‘Group A - old objects’’ (98.5% vs. 84.7%).
We also asked the participants of Group A to run the full HRH
experiments with the new objects: as a result, the loss of accuracy
was quite limited (1.4%) compared to the ‘‘Group A - new objects’’
case. This implies that the range of objects used for CNN training
was wide enough to also include relevant characteristics of the
new objects.
Finally, in the last row of Table 1 it can be observed that the
presence of the participants of Group B reduced the accuracy for
old and new objects of about 11.1% and 12.5%, respectively. This
can be due to the fact that the participants in Group A probably
did not cover all possible grasping ‘‘styles’’ (e.g., maximum force,
grasping speed, etc.) of the participants in Group B. Therefore,
this result could be possibly improved by increasing the size of
Group A. The obtained accuracy for ‘‘Group B - new objects’’ was
lower than that obtained for the test set of Table 1 (70.8% vs.
75.5%): this was also expected, for the same reasons reported for
the ‘‘Group A - old objects’’ case.
6.3. Quantitative results on collaboration fluency
The time evolution of some relevant variables during a typical
HRH is illustrated in Fig. 9, in which the dashed vertical blue
line represents the time instant when the marker is detected
8
Robotics and Autonomous Systems 159 (2023) 104311
Fig. 9. Time span of a normal experiment. The top graph is a plot of the force
of a human hand (red) and a robot hand (black) versus time. The bottom graph
is a plot of the sum of the torques of the Franka robot. (For interpretation of
the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web
version of this article.)
Table 3
Accuracy of object classification in the pre-handover phase for trained (Group
A) and untrained (Group B) participants grasping objects from the training set
(‘‘old objects’’) and new objects.
Old objects New objects
Group A 84.7% 83.3%
Group B 73.6% 70.8%
by the camera, while the dashed vertical gray lines delimit the
time interval in which both human and robot are in contact
with the object. The upper plot shows the evolution of the total
force applied by human (in red) and robot (in black) hands to
the object, normalized in the [0, 1] range. It can be noticed that
the robot hand applies a constant total force when holding the
object. The human instead applies a gradually increasing force,
and tends to decrease it while moving the object towards the
robot. The force applied by the human hand is typically increased
during the handover, which is in agreement with the observations
about HHH in [15], according to which excess grip forces are
usually applied to avoid slippage. Then, the force applied by the
human hand rapidly decreases towards zero when the object is
released. In the lower plot one can see the evolution of the sum
of the robot joint torques. The robot starts moving after about
8 s, after having planned its motion via RRT. The spike in the
total torque of the robot arm represents the contact of the object
with the robot hand, which triggers the robot grasping. After
remaining approximately constant during the grasping phase, the
robot torque starts varying again during retreat.
For safe and comfortable HRH, and to avoid damaging either
the object or the robot, or injuring the human participant, the
robot needs to wait until the participant releases the object. For
this reason, it is important to use the tactile glove to determine
the end of the passing phase. To show the human reaction when
this protocol is not followed, we programmed the robot to retreat
the object before the participant released it, and the area framed
within the gray box in the upper plot of Fig. 9 illustrates the
time evolution of human and robot grasping forces in this case.
In the time interval when the handover happens we can observe
an increase in the human’s grasping force (red line) when the
A. Mazhitov, T. Syrymova, Z. Kappassov et al.
Fig. 10. Responses of the participants to the questionnaire: experienced participants are indicated by circles, and inexperienced participants by crosses.
robot pulls the object away: this confirms some of the findings
described in [17], according to which people tend to rapidly
increase grip forces to ensure stability of the grasped object in
the event of unpredictable load–force disturbance.
6.4. Qualitative results
To assess how the HRH experiments were subjectively experi-
enced by each participant, we asked them to fill in a questionnaire
at the end of the experimental procedure. The four questions,
which were either taken verbatim or adapted from those listed
in [2, Sec. VI], are reported in Fig. 10.
Our interpretation of trustworthiness was the belief that the
robot teammate would complete the handover, and would not
damage or drop the object. However, some participants might
have also considered an interpretation of trustworthiness related
to safety, i.e., the participants would trust the robot not to hurt
them during handover. The idea of smoothness of the handover
was interpreted by us as the absence of unexpected movements
of the robot hand that might have led to failure; based on this
interpretation, smoothness would have been negatively impacted
if the robot had pulled the object too late or while the human was
still holding it, or if the robot had damaged or dropped the object,
possibly due to wrongly classifying it. We assume that users
interpreted it in the same way, as the employed terminology was
quite intuitive. The concept of aggressiveness can be related both
to the overall robot motion (e.g., sudden accelerations of the robot
arm), or to the hand only, thus being related to the absence of
handover smoothness. Finally, the idea of fluency of the collab-
oration was related to all of the three previous concepts, also
noticing that fluency and smoothness are often used as synonyms
in human–robot interaction papers. The employed questions are
rather standard in this type of experiments, but we understand
that differences in their interpretations by the participants are to
be expected. Our aim was to determine the overall perception of
the HRH experiment without too much focus on single aspects.
From the results in Fig. 10, it can be observed that the robot
was perceived as trustworthy and its motion as not aggressive.
Also, the handover process was generally perceived as smooth
and the participants felt to be working fluently with the robot
as a team.
As for the background of the eight participants, all Nazarbayev
University students from different science/engineering majors,
only four of them had previous experience in working with
robots. In Fig. 10, experienced participants are indicated by cir-
cles, and inexperienced participants by crosses. Overall, there was
no strong evidence that previous experience would lead to a
better or worse evaluation of the different questions. This can
also be related to the fact that more experience might, on the one
hand, make participants more relaxed (thus providing a positive
9
Robotics and Autonomous Systems 159 (2023) 104311
evaluation of their experience) and, on the other hand, make
them evaluate the robot’s performance more critically.
We also asked the participants to provide any free comments
and suggestions after filling the questionnaire. Several partic-
ipants highlighted the use of the ArUco marker as a possible
source of discomfort. Indeed, the marker located on the partic-
ipant’s wrist must always be in the correct orientation and not
occluded by clothes or by the object, such that it can be detected
by the camera. To improve this aspect for future research, one
possible solution is to use methods that do not make use of ArUco
markers, such as those described in [3,34].
7. Conclusions and outlook
This paper presented an HRH pipeline which includes the use
of a wearable tactile glove to classify rigid/deformable objects
prior to handover, the consequent adaptation of the robot grasp-
ing force, and the use of the tactile glove to determine the end
of the passing phase. The obtained experimental results on eight
human participants and 24 objects showed that the proposed
approach has a strong potential for real-world HRH scenarios,
especially when grasping soft or rigid objects with the wrong
force of the robot hand fingers could lead to damaging them.
Therefore, the answer to the research question ‘‘Is it possible to
execute HRH with different robot grasping force for soft and rigid
objects, without previous knowledge of the object characteristics?’’
is definitely yes. Regarding the second research question on suc-
cess rate, the classification accuracy via CNN using the pressure
sensors on the glove varied from 84.7% with Group A participants
(precisely instructed on how to grasp the objects also used for
training), down to 70.8% with Group B participants (grasping
objects not used for training, and without precise grasping in-
structions). Finally, the questionnaire results showed a general
positive perception of the HRH process.
Many directions can be identified for future work. A first possi-
bility is to improve user comfort by using methods without ArUco
markers, as mentioned in Section 6.4. Also, the described HRH
framework can be tested within more complex human–robot in-
teraction tasks, for example studying how human subjects adapt
their motion when the robot modifies its grasping orientation
based on the passed object. A third direction can be that of
continuously adapting the grasping torque of the robot hand to
the stiffness of the object, rather than using only two threshold
values. A fourth possibility would consist of extending the pro-
posed classification problem to the case in which participants are
not instructed to use any particular type of grasp.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-
cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared
to influence the work reported in this paper.
A. Mazhitov, T. Syrymova, Z. Kappassov et al.
Data availability
Data will be made available on request.
Acknowledgments
The first two authors contributed equally. This work was
funded by Nazarbayev University under Collaborative Research
Project no. 091019CRP2118 and by the Ministry of Education and
Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan under grant no.
AP09058050.
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary material related to this article can be found
online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.robot.2022.104311.
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Ayan Mazhitov is currently a M.Sc. student in Robotics
at Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan, and a
research assistant in the Robot Control and Learning
(RCL) Lab. He received the B.Sc. in Robotics and Mecha-
tronics from Nazarbayev University in 2019. From 2017
to 2019, he worked as a research assistant in several
robot manipulation projects. His research interests are
in reinforcement learning and robot control.
Togzhan Syrymova is currently a M.Sc. student in
Robotics at Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan,
and a research assistant in Robot Control and Learn-
ing (RCL) Lab. She received the B.Sc. in Robotics and
Mechatronics from Nazarbayev University. From 2018
to 2019, she worked as a research assistant in sev-
eral embedded systems projects. Her research interests
are in tactile sensing, medical robotics, and machine
learning.
A. Mazhitov, T. Syrymova, Z. Kappassov et al.
Zhanat Kappassov received the Specialist Degree in
Radioengineering from Tomsk State University of Con-
trol Systems and Radioelectronics (TUSUR), Tomsk,
Russia, in 2011. Afterwards, he worked in the In-
dustrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), Taiwan.
He received his Ph.D. in Robotics from the Institute
of Intelligent Systems and Robotics (ISIR), Sorbonne
University (formerly Université Pierre et Marie Curie),
Paris, France, in 2017. Since 2020, he has been an As-
sistant Professor of Robotics at Nazarbayev University,
Astana, Kazakhstan. His current research interests focus
on tactile sensing for robot physical interaction and dexterous manipulation. He
regularly serves as reviewer for journals and conferences in the field of robotics.
He was awarded the TOYOTA award during the ISER2016 conference, Tokyo,
Japan. His Ph.D. thesis was nominated as the Best Ph.D. Thesis in 2017 by the
GDR Robotique association in France.
11
Robotics and Autonomous Systems 159 (2023) 104311
Matteo Rubagotti received the Ph.D. degree in Elec-
tronics, Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering
from the University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy, in 2010. Since
2018, he has been an Associate Professor of Robotics
and Mechatronics at Nazarbayev University, Astana,
Kazakhstan. Previously to his current post, he was a
Lecturer in Control Engineering at the University of
Leicester, Leicester, UK, and, before that, a Postdoctoral
Fellow at the University of Trento, Trento, Italy, and
at IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca, Italy. His
research interests are in control systems and robotics,
including physical human–robot interaction. He has co-authored more than
60 technical papers in international journals and conferences. Dr. Rubagotti
is IEEE Senior Member, and is currently Subject Editor of the International
Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control. He is also member of the conference
editorial boards of the IEEE Control System Society and of the European Control
Association.