Safe human-robot cooperation

A real-time collision avoidance approach is presented for safe human-robot coexistence. The main contribution shown in this video is a fast method to evaluate distances between the robot and possibly moving obstacles (including humans), based on the concept of depth space. The distances are used to generate repulsive vectors that are used to control the robot while executing a generic motion task. The repulsive vectors can also take advantage of an estimation of the obstacle velocity. In order to preserve the execution of a Cartesian task with a redundant manipulator, a simple collision-avoidance algorithm has been implemented, where different reaction behaviors are set up for the end-effector and for other control points along the robot structure. Reference: F. Flacco, T. Kröger, A. De Luca, O. Khatib: A depth space approach to human-robot collision avoidance, Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Robot. Autom. (ICRA), Saint Paul (2012), pp. 338-345