Title: 
Robot Motion Synthesis and Control for Human-Initiated Physical Interaction

Abstract: 
In this talk, I will review some of our work in
human-initiated physical human-robot interaction.  Using two example
tasks including object hand-over, we will discuss the motion synthesis
and control issues to realize quick and natural responses so that
humans can interact seamlessly with robots.  The first example is
playing catch (a.k.a. rude object hand-over) where we will show how
motion and reaction design improves user perception of the robot.
Another example is (polite) human-to-robot object hand-over, where we
apply a motion database to human motion recognition and prediction as
well as robot motion synthesis.