CollaboRobot — Nonverbal Human–Robot Negotiation
A human and a robot arm decide what to cook together: No speech, no script, just noverbal negotiation.
CollaboRobot is a nonverbal negotiation between a person and a robot arm: Both shape the final recipe by moving ingredient cubes between zones, with the robot and the human both signaling intent through legible motion instead of words.
Overview
This was our project in the course Praktikum Human-Robot Interaction led by Prof. Dr. Andreas Butz.
Built with a 3-person team, CollaboRobot is a nonverbal, open-ended negotiation between a person and a Kinova Gen3 arm: neither knows the final outcome at the start and both shape it by moving ingredient cubes between a Storage, a Proposal and an Accepted zone.
How It Works
The robot perceives the table with a camera, proposes and rejects ingredients, and signals intent through legible motion and gestures instead of words. The human places an ingredient in the Proposal zone; the robot reads the table state and responds — moving it to Accepted, rejecting it back to Storage, proposing something of its own, or skipping its turn. A statistical model over a recipe corpus drives these decisions until a coherent recipe emerges.
My Role
I led the team and designed the whole architecture. Specifically I implemented the motion and then the system architecture — the ROS2 stack, action servers, and hardware coordination that turn decisions into safe, legible movement on real hardware.