Over the last two decades, the foundations for physical human–robot interaction (pHRI) have evolved from successful developments in mechatronics, control, and planning, leading toward safer lightweight robot designs and interaction control schemes that advance beyond the current capacities of existing high-payload and highprecision position-controlled industrial robots. Based on their ability to sense physical interaction, render compliant behavior along the robot structure, plan motions that respect human preferences, and generate interaction plans for collaboration and coaction with humans, these novel robots have opened up novel and unforeseen application domains, and have advanced the field of human safety in robotics.
This chapter gives an overview on the state of the art in pHRI as of the date of publication. First, the advances in human safety are outlined, addressing topics in human injury analysis in robotics and safety standards for pHRI. Then, the foundations of human-friendly robot design, including the development of lightweight and intrinsically flexible force/torque-controlled machines together with the required perception abilities for interaction are introduced. Subsequently, motionplanning techniques for human environments, including the domains of biomechanically safe, risk-metric-based, human-aware planning are covered. Finally, the rather recent problem of interaction planning is summarized, including the issues of collaborative action planning, the definition of the interaction planning problem, and an introduction to robot reflexes and reactive control architecture for pHRI.
Injury evaluation of human-robot impacts
Author Sami Haddadin, Alin Albu-Schäffer, Michael Strohmayr, Mirko Frommberger, Gerd Hirzinger
Video ID : 608
In this video, several blunt impact tests are shown, leading to an assessment of which factors dominate injury severity. We will illustrate the effects that robot speed, robot mass, and constraints in the environment have on safety in human-robot impacts. It will be shown that the intuition about high-impact loads being transmitted by heavy robots is wrong. Furthermore, the conclusion is reached that free impacts are by far less dangerous than being crushed.
Reference: S. Haddadin, A. Albu-Schäffer, M. Strohmayr, M. Frommberger, G. Hirzinger: Injury evaluation of human-robot impacts, Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Robot. Autom. (ICRA), Pasadena (2008), pp. 2203 – 2204; doi: 10.1109/ROBOT.2008.4543534.