Human-robot physical interaction (pHRI) is a rapidly evolving research field with significant implications for physical therapy, search and rescue, and telemedicine. However, a major challenge lies in accurately understanding human constraints and safety in human-robot physical experiments without an IRB and physical human experiments. Concerns regarding human studies include safety concerns, repeatabil-ity, scalability of the number, and diversity of participants. This paper examines whether a physical approximation can serve as a stand-in for human subjects to enhance robot autonomy for physical assistance. This paper introduces the SHULDRD (Shoulder Haptic Universal Limb Dynamic Repositioning Device), an economical and anatomically similar device designed for real-time testing and deploying pHRI planning tasks on robots in the real world. SHULDRD replicates human shoulder motion, providing crucial force feedback and safety data. The device's open-source CAD and software facilitate easy construction and use, ensuring broad accessibility for researchers. By providing a flexible platform able to emulate infinite human subjects, ensure repeatable trials, and provide quantitative metrics to assess the effectiveness of the robotic intervention, SHULDRD aims to improve the safety and efficacy of human-robot physical interactions. Project URL: https://sites.google.com/view/haptic-shoulder/home

Robots “in-the-wild” encounter and must traverse widely varying terrain, ranging from solid ground to granular materials like sand to full liquids. Numerous approaches exist, including wheeled and legged robots, each excelling in specific domains. Screw-based locomotion is a promising approach for multi-domain mobility, leveraged in exploratory robotic designs, including amphibious vehicles and snake robotics. However, unlike other forms of locomotion, there is limited exploration of the models, parameter effects, and efficiency for multi-terrain Archimedes screw locomotion. In this work, we present work towards this missing component in understanding screw-based locomotion: comprehensive experimental results and performance analysis across different media. We designed a mobile test bed for indoor and outdoor experimentation to collect this data. Beyond quantitatively showing the multi-domain mobility of screw-based locomotion, we envision future researchers and engineers using the presented results to design effective screw-based locomotion systems.

There has been increasing awareness of the difficulties in reaching and extracting people from mass casualty scenarios, such as those arising from natural disasters. While platforms have been designed to consider reaching casualties and even carrying them out of harm's way, the challenge of repositioning a casualty from its found configuration to one suitable for extraction has not been explicitly explored. Furthermore, this planning problem needs to incorporate biomechanical safety considerations for the casualty. Thus, we present a first solution to biomechanically safe trajectory generation for repositioning limbs of unconscious human casualties. We describe biomechanical safety as mathematical constraints, mechanical descriptions of the dynamics for the robot-human coupled system, and the planning and trajectory optimization process that considers this coupled and constrained system. We finally evaluate our approach over several variations of the problem and demonstrate it on a real robot and human subject. This work provides a crucial part of search and rescue that can be used in conjunction with past and present works involving robots and vision systems designed for search and rescue.